Creating A Flemish Masterpiece

It seemed unlikely the U.S. men would do well. Rodgers and Frank Shorter were home running road races, and although AAU champion Rick Rojas of the Colorado Track Club was along, he had been sick with one virus or another for two months. "I took him for a 10-mile run last week," said his Colorado teammate Steve Flanagan, "and he didn't recover from it for four days."

Race day dawned sunny and crystalline, but soon a blustery March wind blew up clouds. After the junior teams had paraded before the 10,000 noisy spectators, swirling rain began to fall as a skyrocket signaled the start of their race.

The field of 88 bolted the first 300 yards of uphill, wormy ground as if the race were 800 meters, not 7,500. "I kept telling myself to stay back," said Thorn Hunt of the University of Arizona , an 8:35.1 two-miler who had finished second last year. Hunt stayed in the middle of the pack early, but as the injudicious front-runners began to be sucked down by two soft stretches of sand and a raised hump of land called an Erdwall (earth-wall), he gained rapidly. With two of the three laps to go he led a pack of nine contenders. The most threatening rival appeared to be Finland 's Ari Paunonen, the European junior 1,500-meter record holder with the fine time of 3:38.4.

Hunt kept the pressure on, rolling freely downhill and letting Paunonen lead the uphills. "I lost the race last year on the downhills," Hunt said later. "Pm improving." Over the log barrier in the stretch with a mile-and-a-half lap to go, Hunt burst away to a 15-yard lead. Coming out of the Erdwall he had built it to 30. Paunonen sagged. "With 500 to go I knew I was safe," said Hunt. Taking the last barrier like an intermediate hurdler, he came home with a graceful sprint, his long hair flying, to win by 80 yards. Mark Spilsbury, a University of Colorado freshman who is the U.S. junior cross-country champion, was fifth; Marty Froelick of Houston was 12th; and Chris Fox of Martinsburg , W. Va. finished 18th to give the U.S. 36 points, enough for a four-point win over Spain .

After receiving his medal, Hunt stripped off his clammy racing shirt for one of the senior men to wear—the AAU had not sent enough—and said, flushed and excited, "It'd be fun to jump into the long race now, just to be in that incredible pack."

But first it was the women's turn, over 5,100 meters. Julie Brown , intent on duplicating the tactics that won for her two years ago, headed the field from the start, running powerfully, dangerously so. On her back were defending champion Carmen Valero of Spain and the 1972 Olympic 1,500-meter gold medalist, Lyudmila Bragina of the Soviet Union . As the skyrockets marking the leaders' passage went up at 1,000 meters and 2,000 meters, Brown held her lead, resisting Valero's repeated challenges. By 3,000 meters Brown was a wreck. "I felt I had my best chance running in front," she said later. "But I shouldn't have fought everybody off all the time." She drifted back, eventually finishing 14th. With a mile to go, the race was between Valero—a 4:08.3 1,500-meter runner possessed of an economical, rolling stride—and Bragina, the far faster finisher, who seemed to be running stiffly, her knees low. Five hundred yards out Valero slipped away by 20 yards through the final sand hazard, but as they entered the stretch she could go no faster. It was up to Bragina. She closed. But only to within two seconds. Still, with Soviet women placing second, third, fourth and sixth, they easily won the team race. The U.S. was second among the 17 women's teams, with Brown 's L. A. Track Club teammate Sue Kinsey eighth, Kathy Mills of Penn State 11th, Iowa State 's Peg Neppel 15th and Heritage 48th.

Mills was the biggest surprise. A slender 18-year-old from Syracuse , N.Y., she had been only eighth in the AAU championship. "I wasn't as tired as I thought I'd be," she said, clutching a plastic sack stuffed with Russian dolls she had received in exchange for most of her running uniform. "It was a lot of fun."

Women are probably better suited for having fun at this sort of thing, for the senior men's 12,300-meter race was a shifting spectacle of weariness. This may be the hardest race in the world to win, pitting as it does the best runners from a variety of events: milers against marathoners, steeplechasers against 10,000-meter men. In no other kind of running is the strain so great. The toll of constantly hauling oneself out of sand, over logs and away from surrender is eventually a certain blindness of will. The closest thing to it on the track is the steeplechase. But the cross-country world championship is four times as long.

As the 20 teams assembled in the starting gates, watery sunshine spread across the fields. The commands were given; there was a tense moment of stillness and the 180 runners were off, shouting as if in a cavalry charge.

Around a sweeping right turn coursed the horde, six abreast, and over the first Erdwall. Eighty yards after that came a wrenching left on muddy turf. Welsh captain Dick Evans, a schoolteacher, fell. Tony Sandoval was running a few places behind. "He ducked down, looking to his left," Sandoval recalled. "I'll never forget the look of terror as my knee came by his face." Then Evans began to be struck by other runners in the horde. "I screamed," he said later. "And kept screaming until it was safe." Finally, spit from the back of the pack with only bruises, Evans scrambled up and went on. "I passed 40 men or so. That's not bad when you figure I could have been dead."