Last year: heartbreak. The Stanford men’s cross country team lost the NCAA championship to Colorado by a single point, the closest race in the history of the event. This year: redemption. Pounding in a pack across the finish line, the No. 1-ranked team placed four runners among the top 10 finishers in the 10,000 meters to win the national championship on November 25 in Terre Haute, Ind. In the 6,000-meter women’s race, the Cardinal finished second behind Brigham Young.
“I haven’t seen a team dominate like this at this level in quite a while,” coach Vin Lananna said after the men’s race, which they won by 60 points over second-place Wisconsin. “And our women’s team also did an outstanding job and finished right where they were expected to.”
During the regular season, the women’s team won every race and the men all but one, taking third in the 8,000 meters at the Stanford Invitational. They then swept the NCAA west regionals, the men winning their eighth consecutive regional title and the women taking home their sixth in seven years.
In the men’s championship race, senior Grant Robison, the two-time Pac-10 individual champion and a seven-time All-American in cross country and track and field, led the Cardinal with a third-place finish of 29:36.7. Senior Louis Luchini finished in fifth place, junior Donald Sage was sixth, and junior Ian Dobson came in ninth. Senior Adam Tenforde completed the Cardinal scoring in 29th place, and sophomore Ryan Hall, in 37th place, gave the Cardinal a total of six All-Americans.
“We had high expectations going into the season, but this was amazing for us,” said Robison, who stopped out for two years to go on a Mormon mission in South Africa. “Having such a strong team took a lot of individual pressure off me.” His lucky socks and lucky necklace probably didn’t hurt, either.
The No. 2-ranked Cardinal women expected to face tough competition from Brigham Young, and they finished 28 points behind the defending champion. Sophomore Alicia Craig placed third with a time of 19:48, a hair before senior Lauren Fleshman crossed the line at 19:48.3. Senior Malindi Elmore finished in 11th place to give the Cardinal women three All-Americans. Sophomore Sara Bei, in 57th place, and senior Erin Sullivan, in 79th, completed Stanford’s scoring.
Fleshman, a 12-time All-American and Stanford’s top NCAA performer last year with a third-place finish, says there was a “wonderful dynamic” on the teams this year, whether they were working out on the track or getting together for Sunday-night dinners. “We ran with integrity and left it all out on the course,” she said after the NCAAs. “It’s so hard to explain how much I enjoyed this season.”
And that, Lananna stressed both before and after the meet, was the secret: “We went into this season all about team, and everyone has bought into that, myself included.”
