11-YEAR-OLD RECORD SHATTERED AT TEXAS RELAYS
Several minutes after collapsing across the finish line, Lindon Victor was sitting and recuperating on a different portion of the Myers Stadium track Thursday.
Victor glanced up at Pat Henry, his Texas A&M coach.
“Records are hard,” the Aggies’ senior decathlete from Grenada said.
Apparently. The Texas Relays record Victor had just broken had stood 11 years. And it took a tumbling lunge at the finish of the 1,500-meter run — the 10th and final event of the decathlon — to assure that he would supplant former Longhorns star Trey Hardee as the national collegiate record-holder in the decathlon.
Hardee set the record on this same track at the 2006 Relays. For Victor to become the eighth current Aggie to hold a collegiate national record, he needed a time of at least 4 min- utes, 50 seconds in the final event.
After Victor fell across the line, all eyes turned to the scoreboard to see his time. It flashed 4:48.89. And that translated into 8,472 total points to move him ahead of Hardee’s former mark of 8,465.
“To be honest,” Victor said after finally catching his breath, “I didn’t like the score. I think I was on pace to do something really good.”
Not that what he did wasn’t really good. But Victor felt like he left some points off the board in the pole vault. He also had a narrow escape in the discus. But he stepped up when he had to and persevered to claim a longstanding record.
Rice’s Scott Filip finished a distant second with 7,915 points. Texas senior Wolf Mahler was third with a personal-best 7,897, tying him as the fourth-best decathlete in Longhorns’ history.
First-day leader Erica Bougard won her second Relays heptathlon to go with her 2013 crown. Unlike her first victory, this one came with a meet record. Competing for Chula Vista Elite, the former Mississippi State standout totaled 6,246 points. That eclipsed the mark of 6,217 set by Kelly Blair-LaBounty in 2002. “That’s pretty awesome,” Bougard said when told of her record. “I didn’t even know.”
Bougard nursed a 52-point lead over defending Relays champion Taliyah Brooks of Arkansas entering the final event, the 800 meters. Bougard quashed any semblance of suspense, though, by winning the 800 with a time of 2 minutes, 9.79 seconds for 968 points.
Brooks, who began her high school career at Pflugerville before moving to Wichita Falls, finished 10th in the 800 and second in the standings with 6,075 total points.
Victor’s dangerous highwire act began in the discus, where he fouled on the first two of his three attempts. One more would have been fatal. On his last try, though, he uncorked a throw of 173 feet, 11 inches.
It was the best effort of the competition, by almost 38 feet, and more important, gave Victor 933 points and kept him on pace to better Hardee’s record.
“Practice had been going really good in the discus, believe it or not,” he said. “I think I was trying to throw it too hard.”
He also didn’t perform as well as he wanted in the pole vault. He entered the competition at 14-1¼ and got an opening clearance, but then missed all three attempts at the next height of 14-5¼.
“That’s just (what happens in) a multi,” he said. “I’m just learning from my first one (of the season).”