A historical contextualization of the 2022 Champs Sports Cross-Country Finals
There are more really fast distance kids than ever, but is the U.S. really producing all-time greats at a faster rate?
American high-school runners are considerably better today as a rolling unit than they were in the twentieth century. Between starting younger, enjoying batter guidance at critical developmental stages, surfing the benefits of improved footwear, and more opportunities for kids from all over the country to race against elite schoolboys and schoolgirls during the regular season, results from the 1980s and 1990s look positively feeble compared to the exploits of contemporary young stars. This is true wherever you look, from the all-time top performance lists in Track and Field News to the unprecedented cross-country dominance exemplified by the dynastic programs at Saratoga Springs and Fayetteville-Manlius in New York State and the recent Newbury Park boys’ teams in California.
Except that this isn’t true. Not in every respect, and not when focusing on the best of the best.
Yes, most of the names near the top of track performance lists during the 1980s and 1990s have been implacably displaced from the top ten or twenty all-time prep performers. But some of the best high-school cross-country runners the United States has ever seen are well past their fiftieth birthdays. Going by the results of the Kinney Shoes series that began in 1979—and, despite three corporate sponsorship changes, two of them very recent, has remained in the same San Diego venue almost the entire time—the mid-1980s remain an unprecedented bonanza of prep cross-country excellence.
I decided to compare the results of this year’s Champs Sports Finals races to those of the 1984 Kinney Shoes finals on the same Balboa Park course to gain a loose sense of how much faster today’s kids are than the loose kids of thirty-eight years ago.
The 2022 races are in the presentation below, with the girls’ start 1:16:40 into the video and the boys’ start at the 2:06:35 mark. The girls’ results are here, the boys’ here; both are helpfully labeled “Boys Final 2021.”
I chose 1984 (girls’ results; boys’ results) because I wanted to pick a race that happened while I was in high school (that was the fall of my freshman year). That made 1984 an obvious choice: The girls’ winner was from my home state, and I’m acquainted with her and a number of the finishers in both races to different, sometimes quirky degrees.
The boys’ runner-up became a masters’ stud when he grew up and was among the three subjects of an article Podium Runner shrewishly deleted along with nine others I’d written for the site in the spring of 2021 (with those responsible paying for this snit with the death of the publication less than a year later). The boys’ third-place finisher was one the two co-authors I worked with for this 2017 bestseller. And the seventh-place girls’ finisher, the other co-author, has been my best friend in the whole wide world for a long time.
The 23rd-place 1984 girls’ finisher, a freshman, was also from New Hampshire. At the Manchester Invitational that fall, the first large-scale cross-country event I’d ever attended, I found a Mascenic High School class ring on the ground after the awards ceremony with the initials NC on it. I knew it had to belong to the person who had placed very high in the girls’ race and was ridiculously tall, and I was able to immediately find her and throw it at her without a word; I had run at least a minute slower than she had that day, and when you’re 5’ 4”, those big storky girls are an ever-present menace. We would later attend the same college, by which time she had become shorter than me.
Before comparing the 1984 and 2022 races, I have to account for a number of obvious confounders. For one thing, the U.S. population has increased by 40 percent since the mid-1980s, meaning that there should now be seven kids running at a given level for every five there were in the old days, absent other inputs. But glaringly, the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) series, though team-oriented, has siphoned off a sizable but unknown number of runners whose only pre-2008 option was the Kinney Shoes/Foot Locker/Eastbay/Champs Sports Series.
Has NXN managed to pilfer 40 percent of the nation’s Champs Sports Finals-caliber kids? I would guess not, but as truly great individuals (such as the Young and Sahlman siblings of Newbury Park) have increasingly found themselves members of nationally ranked teams, it’s undeniable that a significant number of kids virtually certain to have cracked the all-time top ten at Balboa Park have wound up never racing there. Also, the high-school careers of spectacular runners such as Alan Webb and Dathan Ritzenhein coincided with the relocation of the national finals to Florida between 1997 and 2001, denying these and other great athletes the chance to compete at Balboa as well.
There is also the issue of year-to-year variations in conditions. It doesn’t rain much in San Diego, and it obviously never snows. But it can be hot, and despite Southern California’s relative aridity, the sponginess of the course surface can, I’m told, vary considerably thanks to different levels of moisture, accounting for much of the year-to-year differences in national-finals times.
Finally, forty runners rather than thirty-two—ten boys and ten girls from each of the series’ four regions instead of the previous eight—now compete in the finals. That 25-percent boost isn’t as much of an expansion as the country’s population increase would justify, and it’s still incredibly hard to reach the finals. If anything, the increased number of berths might allow a superior runner to have slightly more of an off-day at a regional meet and still qualify for the finals.
So having undermined my analysis in advance and all reasons for attempting one, here it is.
GIRLS: The median time in 1984 was 17:59.8. This year, it was 17:58.
In 1984, winner Cathy Schiro1 ran 16:48.1. This year, Karrie Baloga won in 16:49.2, with runner-up Ellie Shea running 16:55.1. A total of twelve girls have now broken 17:00 at Balboa Park. But astonishingly, the top four performances are all at least twenty-eight years old.
Melody Fairchild will be the greatest supporter of the girl who manages to break her record. But year after year, at least one new girl comes along with the seeming credentials to break it, and year after year, Melody’s jewel—she won that 1990 race by 59 seconds—stands untouched amid the dust kicked up along the Balboa Park loop.
BOYS: The median 1984 and 2022 times were ~15:41 and 15:31.9—no more of a difference than you might see from one randomly chosen year to the next. The winning times were 14:50.0 and 14:56.6.
The all-time Balboa Park list is even more skewed toward the now-middle-aged than the girls’ is. Of the eighteen boys to break 14:55, twelve did so in the 1980s, two in the 1990s, two in the oughts, and two in the previous decade, both in 2011.
You can see that had I chosen the 1985 finals, the comparison I’m making would have been grossly unfair to recent boys. Only twenty-eight boys have ever broken 15:00 at Balboa Park, and nine of them did it in that one contest.
Despite the slew of confounding variables both mentioned and neglected, it seems that with more and more boys coming into their senior fall seasons with sub-9:00 two-mile track times to their credit, more and more of boys should be capable of running in the 14:40s or better at Balboa. And the same thing applies on the girls’ side; though it’s more typical for fast girls to improve more slowly or stagnate altogether in high school than it is for fast boys, enough girls have come into their final prep seasons on the turf boasting sub-10:15 two-mile times to make sub-17:00s at the national finals more common than they are.
(Data in screen captures from Milesplit.com.)