Up from the muddy, beaten-down grass of the Gans Creek Cross Country Course arose one of the best championship performances in Florida cross country history Saturday morning.
At the NCAA Championships in Columbia, Missouri, the senior Hilda Olemomoi led the Gator women to a fifth-place team finish, equalling the best placement in program history, while freshman Kelvin Cheruiyot’s 14th-place finish in the men’s race was the best by a Gator man since 1990.
Women’s race
Early in the race, Olemomoi, senior Tia Wilson and sophomore Judy Chepkoech found each other and raced together, which is what the trio has managed to do all season. At the South Regional meet, they finished within a half-second of each other.
At the four-kilometer mark, Olemomoi made a decisive move that began to make up significant ground on the women in front of her. A 3:05.3 fifth kilometer moved her all the way to seventh, and a 3:03.4 final kilometer propelled her into third.
“I felt really good with 2K to go,” Olemomoi said. “I was like, ‘I need to try if I can just push to the end.’ I surprised myself that I’m just in front… I was so happy, I was crying.”
This placement is a repeat of what Olemomoi managed last fall on this stage, but an up-and-down path to this race adds extra gravity to the result. She dealt with a series of injuries last track season, and she hadn’t quite displayed the form this fall that was indicative of one of the nation’s very best talents. There were 11 women in the field that had beaten Olemomoi this season, but she got the better of all but one of them when it mattered most.
“She was just excited to run, and I think that’s kind of what’s been missing this year,” Palmer said. “She had been looking at a lot of races and comparing it to how she’d done previously. She was finally in a place where she was, ‘I don’t really care about the results, I just want to put a good effort in.’”
Chepkoech also moved up in the closing kilometers, finishing 16th, while Wilson closed out an impressively consistent race in 22nd. At each kilometer split, Wilson was between 22nd and 27th place. This finish represents a 41-place improvement from Wilson’s race at nationals last fall.
“Tia’s made a lot of growth as far as belief in herself and commitment to the little details,” Palmer said. “Whether it’s taking an iron supplement or getting good rest, it’s the things you feel like you see no gains from, but it just takes six months.”
Senior Beth Morley and sophomore Reagan Gilmore rounded out Florida’s scoring quintet. Morley put in an impressive kick in the final kilometer, passing 24 competitors to finish 27th, while Gilmore crossed the finish line in 145th.
“Beth was kind of our unsung hero of the day,” Palmer said. “She’d effectively been running as our seventh woman, I hate to put a label on it, but she came through big today when she needed to.”
When the dust settled and the scores were tallied up, the Gators’ total of 225 points situated them fifth, an agonizing nine points out of a podium spot. However, it’s still good enough to equal the 2023 team’s placement as the best in program history, and this Florida team totaled 43 fewer points than the team from two years ago.
Men’s race
Cheruiyot looked right at home early on in the largest and most competitive field of his life. The race went out conservatively, as he was in a pack of 37 runners separated by just three seconds at the halfway point of the race.
“It’s nationals… you are going to run the best athletes from different schools,” Cheruiyot said. “Even when you are at 5K, it’s like ‘You are all not breaking.’ All of us were still in it.”
The plan for the race was to follow the pack and go off instinct, according to Palmer, but there wasn’t much racing to be done until just after the eight-kilometer mark. New Mexico junior Habtom Samuel, the eventual national champion, made a devastating move to the front that began to break up the lead pack.
“I didn’t try to react, I stayed at the pace we were going,” Cheruiyot said. “The guys [I was] with, after that move from Habtom, they tried to follow him, but I just said, ‘Let me run steady.’”
Cheruiyot’s best position of the race came just before Samuel’s surge, sitting in seventh at the eight-kilometer split. He dropped seven positions in the dash to the finish, but still finished a strong 14th. He was the top freshman in the field and finished higher than any Gator man at this meet in 35 years.
“The valuable aspect for him is just getting experience in this race,” Palmer said. “I do think he can bang away in the low single digits here in the future.”
The program’s attention now turns to the track. While a majority of the Gators won’t open their indoor seasons until January, a cohort of distance athletes will head to Boston on Dec. 6 for the Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener, aiming to produce impressive times with the last gasps of cross country fitness.
Contact Paul Hof-Mahoney at phof-mahoney@alligator.org. Follow him on X at @phofmahoney.
Paul is a senior sports journalism student and is the cross country/track and field reporter in his third semester with The Alligator. In his free time, you can catch him scrolling Twitter to keep up with an endless flood of track results and training for the media 800-meter race at the World Athletics Championships.
