Drew Hunter & Lukas Verzbicas: Footlocker Comparison

So..... wrote:

How many of these "one win" champions have clocked faster than 14:20 or run 14:26 on a lengthened Footlocker South course?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the south has produced a FL champ in decades.

oh please wrote:

Ever since Saturday I have contemplated making this very thread. I refrained due to the fact that I figured everyone would call him an age cheat. Seems I was right.

Uh, I'm pretty sure only one troll has done that. Everyone else remarking on the topic has defended his age. Don't get your panties in a bunch.

The south couldn't get it done in the war. So I highly doubt they could win much at foot locker.

LV was easily the best of the modern era. Mostly untouchable in cc, and "old man" Cheserek never neat him. I have no question LV could have set the FL course record if he cared about it and wanted it (as he did going sub 4 and breaking the two mile record).

DC Wonk wrote:

LV was easily the best of the modern era. Mostly untouchable in cc, and "old man" Cheserek never neat him. I have no question LV could have set the FL course record if he cared about it and wanted it (as he did going sub 4 and breaking the two mile record).

I agree. I do think Andrew Hunter will break 4 minutes in the mile this coming spring, though, and he might even get close to Verzbicas' two mile record, which LV set against all-pro competition. If Hunter beats those two times on the track, THEN we might argue that he's better than LV, even if I think it's plain to see that in XC, LV was better. I was standing trackside when Hunter beat Grant Fisher in the two-mile at Brooks last spring. He looked great, and he should improve significantly on that 8:42. Now, for those few who might not have seen Verzbicas' sub-4 mile against all-high school competition, here you go:

TrackCoach wrote:

Verzbicas is arguably the greatest high school XC runner ever

Didn't break Virgin's course record.

Didn't break Ritz's Footlocker MW course record.

The typical Letsrun idiot who makes wild accusations with no evidence other than "he wasn't born in the U.S so he must be an age cheat and since he is fast he must be a doper".

Lukas still barely looks 18, the kid is baby faced.

Side note. Lukas definitely had the most dominant FootLocker performance but the guy was also being trained by his parents who were professional triathlon coaches. If every U.S runner was being trained at that level from their freshman year we would see much quicker times across the country.

Phil Fondacaro wrote:

Verzbicas was an overage age cheat. Of course there is no comparison. Sticking with Arcadia guys, enter current aged Moussa instead of Rocha in this year's Footlocker and you would see a truly dominating performance. That was all that you saw in Verzbicas' win.

That's why he skipped a grade. He was 17 years 10 months at that point. That's standard age for a HS senior.

Why do people say that 3:42.2 is equivalent to sub-4:00, when Lukas split 3:43.84 and still subbed 4:00?

Lukas was one of the greatest talents of all time in high school running. It's a tight list -

Jim Ryun

Gerry Lindgren

Steve Prefontaine

Rudy Chapa

Michael Granville

Alan Webb

Dathan Ritzenhein

Galen Rupp

German Fernandez

Lukas Verzbickas

DS wrote:

Why do people say that 3:42.2 is equivalent to sub-4:00, when Lukas split 3:43.84 and still subbed 4:00?

It's called a kick...

DS wrote:

Why do people say that 3:42.2 is equivalent to sub-4:00, when Lukas split 3:43.84 and still subbed 4:00?

Lukas was one of the greatest talents of all time in high school running. It's a tight list -

Jim Ryun

Gerry Lindgren

Steve Prefontaine

Rudy Chapa

Michael Granville

Alan Webb

Dathan Ritzenhein

Galen Rupp

German Fernandez

Lukas Verzbickas

I don't see Virgin there. Virgin would definitely had two national XC championships if they had been run back then. I think the top 10 list needs to have 11 people on it.

As the self-appointed spokesman of the National Stat Geek Association (NSGA) I give everyone permission to add an 11th entry to any top ten list.

Agreed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o

I think one of the more interesting people to watch in that video is Edward Cheserek. He was only a sophomore at the time, and ran 4:04, but he looked quite normal. Similar form and tics (messing with his uniform) as now, yet exceedingly normal and easy to outkick. I don't know how you can watch that video and not realize that yes, Edward Cheserek was high school age in high school, and is not overage by more than a year or two.

I am not saying he was just overage, I am saying he was an age cheat; i.e. he is older than his reported age. Why does he still not have American citizenship? Why does he have an odd relationship with his stepfather/coach?

How does it make any sense that he graduated from high school as an eighteen year old junior (if he was held back for academics, how did he graduate in three years?)? It makes a lot of sense if you have a twenty-five year old for whom school is easy who is sent back to HS to beat up on legitimate aged kids, and then realizes you need to ditch HS and Oregon before the sham is exposed.

See how the stepfather was able to parlay his coaching of 'wunderkind' Lukas into a position as in-house triathlon coach at the Olympic Training Center, but then he is quickly and silently 'let go.' Nothing to see here, just the standard career trajectory of the most talented HS runner ever?

What age-cheat would be so moronic as to pick an age that already made them too old for their grade?

1) Lithuania has a well-established health-care system, and since Verzbicas came from a middle-class family, it's very likely that he has an official birth certificate.

2) He arrived in the country when he was ~9 years old. He also had very limited English, and based on his Lithuanian education up until that point, he was held back one year.

3) By high school, his English had substantially improved, and provided his school district is to be trusted, he took additional courses in order to catch himself up and graduate after his junior year.

The biggest factor that clears Verzbicas from being an age-cheat though, is the fact that he has been in America too long. Let's just take your original statement for a moment, and assume that Verzbicas was 25 as a high school junior, which is 7 years older than he was reported to be. This means he would have had to have been 23 during his freshman year, 22 as an 8th grader, 18 as a 4th grader, and 16 as a 2nd grader.

Do you honestly think that a grade school in suburban Illinois wouldn't have noticed something strange happening when a 16 year old showed up claiming to be 9?

Seriously, go watch a video of one of his races during his freshman year. He was tall, lanky, and looked like a child.

Here's an end-race photo:

And here's a pic of him in a race with two normal 18 year olds, Jantzen Oshier and Elias Gedyon:

Look at his face compared to Oshier in front of him, and his arms compared to Gedyon behind him. If he was 25 during this race, he's by far the most underdeveloped 25-year old to ever break 4:00.

I couldn't care less about LV's age, it was the fact that he was coached by his ex-Soviet athlete mom and his triathlon coach, under very opaque circumstances. For a similar situation, here is another ex-pat who used the U.S. school system to cheat their way to the top:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekaterina_Kostetskaya

I'm sitting in a bar and couldn't help but laugh out loud at this post. Picturing a 16 year old super star taking a spelling test with second graders is pretty darn funny. Anyway, there is no conceivable way Verzbicas was 25 and posing as a 17 year old junior. He was just that good. Accept it and move on.

Seyta wrote: What age-cheat would be so moronic as to pick an age that already made them too old for their grade?

Phil Fondacaro wrote:

Seyta wrote: What age-cheat would be so moronic as to pick an age that already made them too old for their grade?

An extremely cunning one who uses that as a diversion to distract from the actual underlying scam. "yeah, he's overage, but who cares he graduated as a junior so it doesn't matter."

Impossible for Verzbicas to have done that. Looked at the post you quoted and decided to see if I could find older results for him. Turns out he ran the 2007 USATF Youth Champs:

I'll admit that sometimes it's difficult to really tell if a 2X y/o age cheat is pretending to be 18, but Verzbicas was claiming to be 13 at the time of this event. Any age cheats at this level are blatantly obvious due to the rapid rate at which boys mature around this time. If Verzbicas was as old as you claim, then he would have had to successfully convince everyone at this race that he was 13 when he was really 20.