University of Tennessee Athletics
University of Tennessee
NCAA Outdoor Championships
First Day of NCAA Championships Flooded Out
June 09, 2004 | Men's Track
June 9, 2004
AUSTIN, Texas - Tennessee's 4x100-meter relay team took the track and stood just a couple of minutes away from uncorking the Vols' NCAA outdoor championships effort Wednesday afternoon at Mike A. Myers Stadium in Austin, Texas. However, five inches of rain and dangerous lightning forced NCAA meet officials to reschedule almost every first-day event except the women's heptathlon and javelin.
The NCAA track and field committee will burn the midnight oil to agree upon a revised schedule. The group faces a tall task in cramming four full days of action into now a three-day schedule. The fact that many events require three rounds of competition and many athletes will be doubling or tripling in events in a compressed timeframe compounds the difficulty for the competitors.
Though the field events were moved into the night session, the track events were originally to proceed on schedule Wednesday afternoon. Jeremy Burton, Jonathan Wade, Sean Lambert and Jak Taylor had warmed up and taken the track for the 4x100 relay preliminary at about 5:45 p.m. ET. Assigned to the first heat, the Vols were nearly set to get the race underway when the public address announcer reported that lightning had entered an eight-mile radius of Texas' Mike A. Myers Stadium and the facility should be immediately evacuated.
Athletes, officials, fans and staff took shelter in the concourse of Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Football Stadium across the street for nearly three hours before meet officials announced the vast majority of Wednesday's events had been postponed.
Rain has pounded central Texas for most of the last two days, making this June one of the area's wettest on record in just the ninth day of the month. Local news outlets reported downtown Austin had received about five inches of rain in the last 24 hours with even greater amounts reported to the south in San Antonio. At times the rain fell so heavily the dome of the Texas capitol building, supposedly seven feet taller than the U.S. Capitol, was barely visible even though the building is within walking distance of the track.
The discussions of orange centered not upon the merits of the hues donned by Tennessee and Texas, but that of a more ominous quality showing up on weather radars scanning the Texas Hill Country. In the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital of the World," a couple of native sons could have written the soundtrack for the first day of the NCAA outdoor championships. The mood of the day could be succinctly summed up in Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Texas Flood."
The revised meet schedule will be announced after midnight.
LAMBERT UPDATE
Tennessee sprinter Sean Lambert will not be allowed to compete in the 100-meter dash at the NCAA outdoor championships the NCAA's championship cabinet has ruled. The cabinet holds the ultimate decision-making authority on the matter.
The championship cabinet upheld the decision by the NCAA track and field committee. That committee ruled Lambert can compete in the 4x100 relay but not the 100. Lambert, a senior co-captain and chemistry major, plans to run the third leg on Tennessee's 4x100 relay preliminary effort.
The dispute arose when Lambert qualified for the NCAA Mideast Regional finals in both the 100 and 4x100 relay. However, on the advice of an independent physician, Lambert scratched from the 200 prelims that night after experiencing painful hamstring problems. Because he scratched from the 200 prelims Lambert was disqualified from the rest of that meet and the NCAA championships, citing the "honest effort" rule. However, the NCAA track and field committee later agreed Lambert should be allowed to run the relay at the NCAA outdoor meet.
