Nehemiah’s Sophomore Year at UMD
by Steve McGill
As those of you who have been subscribing to The Hurdle Magazine for a while now already know, I’ve been working on a biography of hurdling great Renaldo “Skeets” Nehemiah since March of 2019. I have made significant progress this summer in getting the first draft of the book done. Just a little background for those of you who are new to the magazine: Renaldo Nehemiah was the #1 high hurdler in the world from 1978-1981, and in that span he broke the world record three times. After 1981, he began playing professional football for the San Francisco 49ers. Though he didn’t play a lot, he averaged 17.5 yards per catch in the four years he played with the club, and was a member of their 1985 Super Bowl team. He then returned to the hurdles in 1986, but never dominated like he did in his earlier years, although he remained quite competitive. For much of his post-career life, Nehemiah has been an agent for track and field athletes, most notable of whom is Justin Gatlin, whose career he has managed from its inception in 2003 all the way to the present day. For this month’s discussion, I want to talk about the part of the book I just got finished writing the first draft for: Nehemiah’s sophomore year at the University of Maryland, 1979.
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After finishing his freshman year with a #1 world ranking in the hurdles, Nehemiah continued to dominate the event like no one before him ever had, not even his boyhood idol, 1972 Olympic champion Rodney Milburn. Straight out the gate in the indoor season, Nehemiah broke the world record in the 60 yard hurdles (which was the standard distance for indoors back then) four times, and he also broke the world record in distances that weren’t run as often, including the 50 yard hurdles, the 50 meter hurdles, and the 55 meter hurdles.
Outdoors, he broke the 110 meter world record twice, and he did so before mid-May! He first broke it at the Bruce Jenner Classic (yes, that Bruce Jenner) on April 14, and then broke it again at the Pepsi Invitational on May 6. The old record was 13.21, set in 1977 by Cuba’s Alejandro Casanas. Nehemiah ran 13.16 in the Bruce Jenner meet, which was his first race of the outdoor season. Then he ran 13.00 at the Pepsi Invitational, on the home track of his arch-rival Greg Foster on the campus of the UCLA Bruins.
Between those two world records, he had what many consider the most legendary performance of his career at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. Even though I lived in the area at the time and was thirteen years old, I didn’t go because I didn’t really follow track very much at all back then. I was a basketball fan, and didn’t keep up with track except during Olympic years. But oh man, I wish I had been there that day. It was the last day of the carnival, and Renaldo was entered in three of the Maryland Terrapins’ relay teams scheduled to run finals: the 4×110 shuttle hurdle relay, the 4×200 Championships of America relay, and the 4×400 Championships of America Relay. Not only did all three teams win, but they all won in dramatic fashion. And Renaldo, as anchor leg for all three teams, was the one bringing all the drama. All victories were improbable come-from-behind victories. In the 4×200, the terps were behind by 15 meters when Renaldo received the baton, and he chased down the athlete ahead of him, sending the crowd into a frenzy. The 4×400 was less than an hour later. This time, because the terps’ first leg ran poorly and put the team way behind, the team was a good 20 meters behind by the time Renaldo got the baton. His goal, he said, was just to catch the guy in front of him and make the race look respectable. But on the last curve, he was closing on the leader from Villanova, and the crowd was frantically urging him on, chanting “Skeets! Skeets! Skeets!” Again, he found the strength from within and caught the Villanova runner on the homestretch and held on for the win. His splits were 12.8 hand-timed in the shuttle hurdles, 19.4 in the 4×200, and 44.3 in the 4×400. Think about that: 19.4 and 44.3 for a 110 hurdler! Of the people I’ve interviewed for the book, including some of his teammates on the Maryland team who witnessed the world records, Nehemiah’s Penn Relays performance was the most stunning and awe-inspiring thing they’d ever seen in sports. For his part, Nehemiah vowed to never run the 4×400 ever again, and he never did. Funny thing was, it was not only the last event of the day, but also the last event of the entire meet. He was so exhausted afterward that he went to the training room to recover. By the time he emerged from the training room over an hour later, the stadium was almost completely empty.
Here are some other interesting things to consider that I encountered either through research or through interviews or through my own mind-wanderings for this particular chapter:
Although Nehemiah was known for being charismatic, cordial, and mature beyond his years, he wasn’t above playing mind games with his opponents. His favorite method of getting his opponents to focus on him more than focusing on their own race was to walk up to each of them and shake their hand, wishing them good luck, right before the race was about to start. So they’re looking down their lane of hurdles, getting themselves into the zone, and then here he comes with the good-luck handshakes. Most guys would shake his hand quickly just to get him out of the way. But Foster would smack his hand away, and Casanas would ignore him. The Nehemiah-Foster rivalry is a story unto itself, and I go into in detail in the book. Casanas did not like Nehemiah either.
What a lot of people don’t know is that, the week after the 13.00 (which remained the NCAA record for 40 years, all the way up until Grant Holloway ran 12.98 in 2019), Nehemiah most likely ran the first sub-13.00 race ever, in a meet in Jamaica. But either the timing system malfunctioned, or the officials running the timing system assumed it must’ve malfunctioned because the time was unbelievably fast. Coaches and fans near the finish line had hand-timed him in anywhere from 12.5 to 12.7, all of which would have put him under 13.00 if you convert the hand-time to automatic by adding the .24. It took over an hour before the officials announced a hand-timed 12.82 for the winner, which was very suspicious because hand-times are never measured to the hundredth, but to the tenth. In the official results, his time is listed as a hand-timed 12.8. What he actually ran, we’ll never know, but he says himself that it felt faster than the 13.00.
In regards to Nehemiah’s technique, I had noticed years ago, when I studied his style to see what I could glean from it in teaching my own athletes, that he did a lot of zig-zagging in the lane. I had always said to myself that if I had been his coach, I would have addressed that serpentine action and gotten him to run in a straight line. But that zig-zagging action was actually intentional, and ingrained through high-volume practice sessions. Back then, there was no such thing as “shuffling” between the hurdles like elite hurdlers do now. So Nehemiah and his coach Jean Poquette were trying to figure out how he could better negotiate the space between the barriers without crashing into them. Keep in mind, Nehemiah had 10.18 100 meter speed, so he was getting crowded. So Poquette came up with the idea of having Nehemiah angle his lead leg outside the right post and to then wrap it around so that it was facing the front on the way down, kind of how a trail leg does. Then the trail leg itself would end up landing almost in the exact same spot that the lead leg had landed, causing the zig-zag action in the first step to the next hurdle. He says that if they had known about shuffling back then, they would have done things differently. As it stands, the serpentine method was actually quite effective in creating space.
So is Renaldo Nehemiah the greatest 110 hurdler ever? You could argue that what he did in 1979 alone would give him nod. Ever since his 12.93 in 1981 (which I’ll discuss either next month or the month after that), the world record has dropped in hundredths at a time. From 12.93 to 12.92 (Roger Kingdom) to 12.91 (Colin Jackson) to 12.88 (Liu Xiang) to 12.87 (Dayron Robles) to Aries Merritt’s 12.80. Nehemiah took the record down from 13.21 to 13.00–that’s .21 for those counting–in a single season. So that’s something to think about.
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