Race in the Rain

By running two miles around a soggy cinder track in Princeton's Palmer Stadium, a lean, barrel-chested young man from Auburn, Ind. last week made himself the most talked about athlete in the U. S. The young man was Donald Ray Lash, 22-year-old junior at Indiana University. What made the feat remarkable was the time it took him to accomplish it: 8 min. 58.3 sec.

In 1931, famed Paavo Nurmi ran two miles in 8:59.6. That, except for Nurmi's indoor record of 8:58.2, made on a board track at Madison Square Garden in 1925, is the fastest time ever recorded for a human runner over the distance. Track coaches have generally considered it, of all existing marks, the least susceptible to improvement.

Two miles has always been a hoodoo for U. S. runners. Best time ever made outdoors by a U. S. runner at two miles was 9:10.6 made by Lash in the Drake Relays last April. That he was likely to break his own mark, let alone approach Nurmi's, was a possibility which appeared so remote to sportswriters last week that none of them bothered to mention it in their predictions. Lash had run in the East before, never matched his Midwest form.

The Princeton Athletic Association, which started the Invitation Track Meet two years ago, this year, to avoid charges of commercialization, invited spectators as well as contestants to be non-paying guests. The day of the meet dawned so cold and rainy that only 30,000 of the 50,000 who had reserved free seats turned up in the stands. Puddles on the track dimmed the enticing possibility that the meet's feature race, the mile between Cunningham, Venzke and Bonthron, would produce a record. It failed to do so. Venzke won in 4:13.4.

In the two-mile race, a filler on the program, Lash took the lead in the first lap, set a blistering pace of 62.9 for the quarter. When he turned the mile in 4:26.9, faster than Nurmi's first mile in either of his records, the crowd glued its eyes to the huge seconds clock at the end of the stadium. After five laps, Norman Bright, accepted U. S. record holder, last of the field to try to keep up with the leader, dropped back and it was a race between Lash and the stopwatch.

Lash's victory--under conditions that made his time equivalent to at least three seconds less on a board track indoors-- gave the U. S. a potential winner of the 5,000-metre race at Berlin next August. Trackmen who saw it last week rubbed their eyes, spoke of "The best race--all things considered--ever run."

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