Youth movement taking over trials

Jordan Hasay, meet Gabe Jennings.

Gabe, meet Alan Webb.

Alan, Jordan.

Welcome to the club of youthful greatness and we've got you covered because you just know that there is nothing quite so sweet and seductive as athletic greatness achieved in youth. It is interpreted as both a statement for the present and an unspoken promise for the future. What is good now can surely be better later. Of course it's not exactly automatic.

The curve was on display Friday night at Hayward Field, on the sixth night of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials.

Hasay is the prodigy, 16-year-old, 5-foot-1 wisp of a young woman from Arroyo Grande, Calif. She came to the Trials in midweek uncertain if she would make the field for the 1,500 meters, but with a plane ticket to Poland in hand, where she would compete in the World Junior Championships. Instead, she has advanced through two rounds of the big 1,500 -- on Friday night she set a national high school record of 4:14.50 in her semifinal -- and will run as a longshot in the final on Sunday afternoon.

"I could hear the crowd screaming,'' Hasay, who just finished her junior year in high school, said after race. "It was so exciting.''

She's right. It was.

Webb can relate. In 2000 he was the prodigy, as he tried to end the United States' long drought between high school sub-four-minute miles. Track nuts followed his every move. "Everybody was watching on dialup AOL,'' Webb once said, laughing. He went under four minutes in January of 2001, in his senior year, and then in June crushed Jim Ryun's 36-year-old national high school record with an epic 3:53.43 in the Prefontaine Classic at Hayward. "I'm proud of what I accomplished in high school,'' Webb told me last summer. "If I never ran faster, that's still a great accomplishment.''

Jennings can relate. In 1997, he was Webb, chasing the sub-four and falling short. Writers gobbled up story of being raised by countercultural parents in Wisconsin. He went to Stanford, won two NCAA titles and the 2000 Olympic Trials in the 1,500 meters and then set off a personal odyssey that he says took him from California to Brazil on a bicycle and to Kenya, where he ran in a stadium in which, Jennings told me in the fall of 2005, "They had five heats of the 1,500 with 30 people in each heat and I I was the only white face in the stadium.''