Championship Boys - Le Roux's Redemption, Preston's Reprise
Last year, Erik Le Roux tempted fate and tailed Adugna Moritz early. Fate won. Le Roux faded to fourth in the final standings, finishing 51 seconds back of Moritz. Somehow, though, you knew Le Roux would be back.
He was back this year. Only Le Roux never even opened the possibility of anyone enduring the same fate as he met up with last year. From the earliest stage of the race, Le Roux gapped the field and never gave anyone so much as a whisper of a hope of running in his wind shadow.
Ellicott's Jodzuel (JJ) Juarez is a pretty decent runner in his own right, but Juarez finished 32 seconds back of Le Roux's 11:06. The space between the two seemed all of that, and possibly more. Jackson Shorten took third in 11:50. If you didn't know who Jackson Shorten was before today, you have plenty of company. Things might take a different turn going forward, however.
Simply stated, there was no drama in the individual outcome, at least not until fourth place where the next in the line of Lamar Davises (call him Branden Davis) edged Nathan Pontious, 11:59 to 12:00. Soon thereafter, and as expected, the finishers started coming in surges.
When you have close to 500 runners on the course and only 3500 meters to spread them out, things tend to come in surges as the finish line. In fact, at points, the surges all simply blend together and you have a lot of appendages flailing about for some kind, any kind, of advantage.
Getting a read on the team scoring out on the course is always a difficult assignment. It's worse at middle school state, because you can count on something around 50 or 60 teams in the field, plus assorted individuals. As if all that wasn't bad enough, the bonus layers of clothing being worn today made team scoring by eyeball a completely pointless exercise.
A pretty decent crowd hung around for the team awards, ever hopeful.
As it turned out, Preston Middle School took a fairly substantial win, making it two boys titles in the last three years for Preston, though none of this year's team members ran on the 2015 winning team. Preston's 117 points beat second-place The Classical Academy by 75 points. Cheyenne Mountain was another 22 points back in third.
Preston had no top 10 finishers, but they didn't need any. They had top 20 finishers in Chase McArtor (18th) and Luke Spencer (20th). When Preston had their scoring five across the line, only The Classical Academy had as many as three finishers in the chute.
Such is the stuff of domination.