The Wow Factor
By Steve McGill
This month’s great race is one that carries a lot of personal significance for me, as it is the race that inspired me to want to take the hurdles seriously. I was a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school, a benchwarmer on the basketball team, when I walked into my track coach’s classsroom (he was also a Spanish teacher) to ask him a question. He didn’t even look at me as I walked in the room, as his eyes were focused on the television screen. He was playing a videotape of a track meet, and all he said to me was, “You need to be looking at this.” So I took a seat and watched with him. He rewound the tape and pressed play. What I saw absolutely astounded me. It was a 110 meter hurdle race, and the guy in the lead was running so fast over the hurdles that it looked like the hurdles weren’t even there. How does he run like that? I wondered. How does anyone ever get to be so good at what they do? At that point in my life, I thought of myself as more of a basketball player than a track athlete, and I only ran track as a way to get away from the pressures of basketball during the spring, I heard a voice inside me say, I want to learn how to do that.
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The race we were watching on that spring day in 1982 was the world record race that Renaldo Nehemiah had run in August of 1981 at the Weltklasse meet in Zurich, Switzerland. For the third time in his career, Nehemiah had broken the previous world record. For the second time, he had broken his own world record. For the first time, he had “officially” broken the magic 13.00 barrier with his new world record time of 12.93. The reason I put “officially” in quotes is because Nehemiah had run under 13.00 twice prior to then, but meet officials changed the time because they didn’t believe anyone could run that fast.
What also made this race so thrilling is that it marked the peak of the rivalry between Nehemiah and Greg Foster. Throughout the late 70’s and into the early 80’s, Nehemiah and Foster ruled the 110 hurdles. While there were plent of other good hurdlers around during this time – Tonie Campbell, Dedy Cooper, an older Rodney Milburn (to name a few) – Nehemiah and Foster were clearly head and shoulders above the rest. And to make things even better, they didn’t like each other. Foster, a year older than Nehemiah, looked down upon Nehemiah as a menace, a nuisance And Nehemiah didn’t appreciate the fact that Foster didn’t respect his talent. And back then, because there weren’t any World Championships yet, big European meets like the Weltklasse were the showdown meets.
Nehemiah was also running on a bit of extra adrenaline. Prior to traveling to Switzerland, he had gotten into an argument with hurdling guru Wilbur Ross, who was coaching him in the weeks prior to the meet. Fueled by anger and the competitive desire to triumph over his rival, Nehemiah blasted out of the starting blocks and gained an early advantage. Foster, right next to him one lane over in the middle of the track, pushed the pace and gained a slight lead by hurdle four. For the middle part of the race, they ran side by side before Nehemiah pulled away slightly around hurdle eight. He carried that slight edge all the way to the finish line, crossing the line in 12.93, with Foster right behind him in an almost equally phenomenal 13.03.
That race, in retrospect, marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. It marked the end of the Nehemiah/Foster rivalry, as Nehemiah went on to play professional football after the 1981 season. Though he came back to the hurdle five years later, he was not the same, and therefore the rivalry was not either. For Foster, the Weltklasse race ended up standing as his personal best for his career. Though he went on to win an Olympic silver medal in 1984, three World Championship gold medals in 1983, 1987, and 1991, and though he won numerous other big races for the next decade, he never ran as fast as he did on that magical night in Zurich.
That race also quite arguably marked the beginning of the modern era of hurding. Nehemiah’s 12.93 set the standard that all elite hurdlers strive to achieve to this day. To run sub-13 is still very difficult, very challenging, and very rare.
For me personally, it’s funny because, when I look at footage of the race now, I see several technical flaws in the form of both Nehemiah and Foster that the coach in me wants to correct. In that sense, the wonder and awe that I felt when I first viewed the race in my coach’s classsroom has worn off. But sometimes hurdling isn’t all about technique. Sometimes, it’s also about what Nehemiah has referred to as “the wow factor” – the ability to inspire. That race will always be a source of inspiration for me.
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