ROBERTSON, OLYMPIC TRACK COACH, AND T. F. KEANE TELL OF I.C.A.A.A.A. RECORDS

The following articles, dealing with aspects of the I.C.A.A.A.A. meet which will take place here on May 28 and 29, were written by two men prominent in the world of track athletics. The first written by Lawson Robertson, University of Pennsylvania and Olympic track coach, deals with the 440-yard dash, Coach T. F. Keane of Syracuse University, in the second article, writes about the 220-yard cash, the record for which has not been broken in an I. C. A. A. A. A. meet since 1896.

Two weeks before Ted Meredith set the present 440 yard record for the I.C.A.A.A.A. meet he ran the 100 yards in 10 seconds, the 220 in 21 4-5 and the 440 in 49, winning all three events. That afternoon's work, turned in against Dartmouth in 1916, assured me that Pennsylvania's greatest runner was fit and ready for record-smashing.

The ninth assault on Meredith's quarter mile mark will be made on May 28 and 29 at the Harvard Stadium, and that golden anniversary meet will round out just half a hundred I.C.A.A.A.A. 440 yard races. I have been asked whether I think Meredith's record can be broken. My reply is "Yes, but" And the "but" is that the man to break the record must be a sound 10 second sprinter.

The May afternoon in 1916 when Meredith came racing down the long straightway on his record "440" he was trailing at the 220 yard stage. But he was following orders. His most respected rival in that race was Westmore Willcox of Harvard. Willcox had done 48 seconds on two occasions and this was his last college race. Meredith had an 880 final to run an hour later, so I told him to hang close to Willcox's shoulder for the first half of the "140."

Willcox Finishes Fourth

In previous clashes with Meredith, Willcox had hung back and attempted the arduous assignment of beating his rival with a driving finish. In this race he elected to go out from the gun and it was this fact which made the record a possibility. Meredith was at the Harvard man's shoulder as they whisked past the furlong post in 21 4-5 and the Penn runner forged ahead entering the homestretch. Willcox was so spent by his early efforts that he finished fourth.

The ideal way to stage the intercollegiate quarter-mile event would be on a course without a bend, but such a plan is impracticable. The only scheme of conducting the event in lanes is fair to the competitors and yet not entirely satisfactory because the man-to-man element is diminished by the staggered starting marks. So long as the race is conducted under present conditions there is bound to be some jockeying, but I think it is to the credit of the I.C.A.A.A.A. competitors that the championship races down through the years have been fought in clean, manly fashion.

The one-mile relay race never has been included in the intercollegiate championships, but if I had an opportunity to choose an all-time one-mile relay team, picking the men on the basis of speed, experience, and reliability, I would choose the four men in this order: J. E. Meredith of Pennsylvania. Maxey W. Long of Columbia, Frank J. Shea of Pittsburgh and Charles D. Reidpath of Syracuse. All of these men have won I.C.A.A.A.A. titles, and to my way of thinking they would be from seven to ten yards faster than any combination of runners in the past 25 years.

In spite of the fact that Maxey Long is the officially accredited holder of the world's record for the quarter mile, in which he was timed in 47 seconds fiat, in my opinion a better performance was made in 1915 by James E. Meredith at the National Championship in San Francisco in the Senior 440 yards, in which he equalled Long's mark, but the record was not allowed.

The mark of 47 seconds by Long was in the nature of a paced race in which two runners, P. J. Walsh of New York Athletic Club, and W. S. Edwards of Knickerbocker Athletic Club, paced him for half of the distance on a specially prepared course on the old Guttenberg Race Track some 25 years ago. Long was a marvelous runner, and his record of 47 4-5 around a handicap field at Travers Island subsequently proved, to my way, of thinking, that he was the second best quarter miler on record, in as much as Meredith's 47 2-5 at Cambridge in 1916 was run under about similar conditions.