If you take Ritz out of a time machine from 2003 and drop him on the 2024 start line, he's somewhere in the top 25.
If you take freshman Ritz and give him the latest shoes and modern coaching he's a national title contender within 2 years.
If you take Ritz out of a time machine from 2003 and drop him on the 2024 start line, he's somewhere in the top 25.
If you take freshman Ritz and give him the latest shoes and modern coaching he's a national title contender within 2 years.
John Wesley Harding wrote:
Honestly I think the backlash to the OP’s take has gone too far. Win like he always did? He won one NCAA XC title by 1.3 seconds. Gavin Thompson of Eastern Michigan was 3 seconds back and had lifetime bests of 3:59y-8:01-14:00-28:40. Ritz was 4th as a freshman in his only other NCAA XC championship, 24 seconds behind Boaz Cheboiywo. He never won an NCAA title on the track, placing 4th in the 5k in 2002 and 2nd in the 5k in 2004, outdoors; indoors he was 3rd in the 5k in 2002 and 4th in 2004 a few months after winning that XC title. In 2003 he was 24th at Sr. World XC. That’s not always winning.
Assuming we’re talking about an NCAA version of Ritz and not peak (2009) Ritz, I doubt that he’d win this year or have won last year or plenty of other years. 13:03/9th at the Olympics Graham Blanks, 26:53/17th at Sr. World XC Habtom Samuel, 13:06 Ky Robinson (18 seconds back), 12:57/26:52 Nico Young (27 seconds back)—2023 was no easy race to win. I also think college Ritz would be torched by a guy like Sam Chelanga v.2009, who beat Chris Derrick by 33 seconds and would run 27:08 (pre-super spikes) a few months later.
Ritz was absolutely a great runner and would be highly competitive in this era, a smart pick for top 5-10, but the competition IS stronger and Ritz never had the best run of health in college, so I doubt that he would come out on top.
I know I'm late to the conversation, but I saw someone had bumped this thread and I wanted to respond to this comment. Here are my thoughts on what you wrote:
ZachSawyer wrote:
Now that we have more elite athletes running NCAA cross where do you think someone like peak NCAA Dathan Ritzenhein would place at NCAA nationals?
I would guess around 20th at best, he'd maybe be the 5th or 6th guy at OK State or 4th guy at Alabama.
Ah, to live in bouncy shoe fantasy land. Must be nice.
Ritz won NCAAs on a 5-week season, backed by maintaining endurance in the pool for months. Hall was rather unstoppable for 2 years in cross country. Fall 2002 didnt work out in his favor at the national meet but he was indeed considered a title contender going into the race. So Hall really wanted 2003 and was pretty confident. Ritz stole that show.
His follow up track accolades were also efforts that duct taped otherwise injured seasons. He'd be injured and show up. Ritz's talent was quite rich and he came with an extra fight. Someone else said he rose to the occasion in his races.
Hall actually had the better track seasons.
Ritz outgrew the NCAA system in one way but he was likely also annoyed by it too. Really hard to top the 2003 win.
Dude was 3rd at world JR XC as a high schooler. I think he would do just fine in any era. He quit the NCAAs after his JR year. In the modern era he could have stuck around for six years while getting paid with super shoes.
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