Perfect Race

"I'm never one to predict whether I'll win nor can I forecast a record. I hear the track is fast and I'm glad of that." So said Glenn Cunningham, University of Kansas senior, as he arrived in Manhattan last week for Princeton's "perfect race." That race was to include three of the greatest milers of the day--Pennsylvania's Gene Venzke, Princeton's Bill Bonthron and Cunningham. The Kansan followed his custom of not bothering to practice. His legs, burned so badly when he was a child that doctors doubted if he would ever walk again, are too delicate to stand much preliminary pounding. The day of the race he motored to Princeton where Venzke and Bonthron had been training separately, golfing together. There he put on track clothes, limbered up for a few minutes while a crowd of 25,000 Alumni Day visitors poured into Palmer Stadium. At the gun, Venzke, best stylist of the three, set the pace. Cunningham passed him at 500 yd., Bonthron on the next curve. What happened next was so amazing to spectators that they could scarcely believe their eyes. Cunningham reeled off the fastest third quarter on record -- 61.8. Then he really opened up and whipped around the last quarter in the incredible time of 59.1. After crossing the finish with a world's record of 4:06.7, he jogged 30 yd. up the track, turned around, trotted back to shake hands with Bonthron who had plodded in 40 yd. behind him. The last mile record (4:07.6) was set at Princeton a year ago by Jack Lovelock of Oxford. To see it broken by nearly a full second would have been enough, by itself, to make last week's track meet perfect. But ten minutes before, breathless spectators had witnessed the unexpected fall of another world mark. Stanford's Ben Eastman, who set a world's half-mile record two years ago, ran his race agains Charles Hornbostel of Indiana, who hai equaled Eastman's time last year. East man was away first, 8 yd. ahead at the first turn of the last lap. Hornbostel cut it down to 4 yd. and then dropped back a yard as Eastman, running with all his oldtime smoothness, whisked across the finish. Eastman's time, a full second faster than anyone has ever run a clocked half mile before, was1:49.8.

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