In a meet that wasn’t lacking in controversy, another surfaced when track and field officials and coaches questioned the record times recorded in a 100-meter preliminary heat at the California high school championships in Clovis.
At this point, nothing will change.
The California Interscholastic Federation said Monday that it stands by the results and will report the record-breaking run by De La Salle’s Jaden Jefferson to the National Federation of State High School Associations as an official mark.
“We received similar notifications from coaches via email about this on Saturday morning,” CIF spokesperson Rebecca Brutlag said in an email to the Bay Area News Group. “We followed up with our timer and verified that at the time of the event in question, there were two independent systems, both showing the same readings, and they were double-checked. Both systems were working properly.”
The CIF’s stance isn’t likely to change opinions.
Rich Gonzalez, the editor of PrepCalTrack and the meet director of the prestigious Arcadia Invitational since 2001, wrote Monday on the social media platform X that his publication is “not carrying results from that heat on our state all-time lists.”
Later, in an interview with the Bay Area News Group, Gonzalez explained that none of those times fit the projection models for those athletes under those wind readings.
He suspects that the starter fired the gun too far from the electronic timing sensor, causing a clock delay.
“Most of the time when you go to a track meet and a race is recalled – and if it’s not a false start, a kid slipping in the blocks or someone jumping, but a mechanical thing – most of the time it’s because the gun was not held close enough to the sensor,” Gonzalez said. “So it didn’t pick up.”
When that happens, Gonzalez added, the starter will usually fire a recall gun or shout “recall, recall.”
Jefferson won Heat 1 in a wind-legal 10.01 seconds on Friday night, the fastest time ever posted by a high school athlete in California and nearly three-tenths of a second faster than the junior’s previous best time set a week earlier.
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Nicolas Obimgba of Torrance ran 10.20 to finish second. That time matched the previous state record and was more than three-tenths of a second faster than Obimgba’s best wind-legal time.
Antrell Harris was timed at 10.24 to finish third in the heat. At his sectional meet the previous weekend, he ran 10.92.
Five of the nine qualifiers for the final came from Heat 1, extremely rare given that the athletes are seeded and spread out evenly across four heats.
Jefferson went on to win the championship on Saturday night, running 10.27. Obimgba took seventh in 10.62 and Harris placed eighth in 10.67.
