Karl Van Calcar’s NCAA steeplechase victory

With all the buzz of the Olympics and the very impressive performance of the Americans in track and field, and not only in the typical sprint events, but this time even the US distance runners had some very impressive results with bold, gutsy, and powerful finishes.  Watching the amazing finish by Kenneth Rooks in the steeplechase to take the silver (the video is very much worth watching!) – I was reminded of an equally-fun and impressive showing many moons ago at the 1988 NCAA championships…..

My senior year in high school our (good) cross country team went to an invitational in Salem, OR that was effectively a midseason precursor to the all-important state meet.  Our team did fine – I think – and I distinctly remember that there was one team from Washington that came down for the meet and had a kid who either won or was second.  Given the status that University of Oregon had in cross country and track and field I think most Oregon runners thought that they were the best on the coast (’til we went to California!) and I think a few folks were surprised that this one kid from one team in the Seattle area basically kicked ass.  But then we got all concerned about the Oregon state meet and forgot about him.  

A year later I found myself at Oregon State University as a freshman, and chose not to try to run collegiately (I decided to join a fraternity instead?!?) but I continued to run quasi-casually with the thought that if college went well I’d try out for the OSU cross country team my sophomore year.  I went to Oregon State in part because I thought I might have a chance to actually run there; University of Oregon – with its much-vaunted program – was way too good for me and my Division 2 speed and it would have been foolish to even try, but OSU’s track and XC programs were kinda faltering a bit – despite having a few really fast middle-distance guys, but they were graduatingI, so I thought maybe I’d have a chance.  So I paid attention to the team, and the new freshman hotshot was….a kid from Washington named Karl Van Calcar, who, as it turns out, had run not only well at an XC meet in Salem, he’d also run the 4th fastest all-time high school 3000m steeplechase time the previous spring.  To be sure, the steeple is not a standard high school event (I’m not sure why) so there are limited opportunities for kids to run it (basically:  open invitationals that are amenable to having fast high schoolers compete) but those that had done it were fast in the other distance events and were very worthy.  

Karl was certain that he wanted to be an engineer, and Oregon State had/has a great engineering program and University of Oregon did not.  But….it was U of O; one of the dominant track programs in the country with many national and international champions and record holders, with a legendary coach in Bill Dellinger.  But ultimately U of O did not offer Karl a scholarship and OSU did – and Karl correctly guessed that the current fast guys would be good mentors/partners for him to develop, even in a substandard program.  So Karl went to OSU. 

As per the general plan, I trained hard over the summer before my sophomore year in Portland with my old pal Eric Fahlman (on scholarship at Washington) and went ahead and tried to wiggle my way onto the fall cross country team. Those fast guys who had anchored the team were still around then, but their eligibility was up so the team’s ranks were kind of decimated, which is what enabled me to be able to make it.  And those fast guys who had given the team some ‘ cred that we tried to follow up on were….ˆfast! Mark Fricker was a sub-four miler who made a decent career for awhile as a rabbit for some of the best guys in the world to follow his red hair as they went for records, Gid Rysdam was an unlikely skinny guy from the Eastern Oregon mill town of Elgin who was an All American steeplechaser, Peter Warner recovered from an awful mill accident near Eugene to qualify for the Olympic Trials in the steeple, and Dick Oldfield made the finals in the Oly Trials 1500m a few years later. And not only were these guys fast, they were hilarious and very welcoming, even to a joey like me, much less mentoring and beating on Karl his freshman year to get him to rise to new, higher level of running.  In particular, meeting Dick changed the course of my life, for a few years hence he hired me to help him run the testing program at Nike and gave me the start in what proved to be my entire career (I think he needed the help so he could train more/harder!).  

But indeed, those guys moved on, leaving enough open spots that I was able to make it onto the team, but in their absence we wallowed about 9th or 10th in the Pac 10, and I was near the back of the pack.  But we had a motley and goofy crew and had a lot of fun, and for credibility we had our star: Karl, who was always knocking around the front of the pack with the fast boyz of U of O, University of Washington, Arizona State, the Cal schools, etc who all had All-Americans on their squads. For me the best thing about being on the team was that Karl turned out to be a super funny, super smart, super humble guy with a big laugh who became a main training partner (I got accustomed to watching him from the back, from far away, though we had many long chatty tempo runs).  Karl won the Pac 10’s in both the steeplechase and the 5000m, had a redshirt year nursing an achilles injury – common for steeplers leaping into a ramped hole filled with water, and that he had to deal with his entire career – and generally did great….but didn’t quite put it together to win the NCAA championships in his first four years.  

Being a high level athlete and maintaining a good gpa in a demanding major Karl planned on taking 5 years to finish, which would have generally been fine, but….the OSU track and XC programs – after losing The Fast Guys and being dragged down by the likes of me! – were becoming even more scraggly over time, with coaching changes, poor results in most other events besides the steeplechase (and an odd dude who was a good hammer thrower), and finally the OSU athletic department decided that they were through with both cross-country and the whole track program (the football team was famously awful at the time as well; there was an article in Sports Illustrated about how awful it was; I’m so psyched to have found it! https://vault.si.com/vault/1984/11/26/now-playing-goodbye-corvallis ) In the meantime they had hired a coach for the final season who was terrible, but at least he was an asshole as well.  

So Karl did what any collegiate athlete would do:  he told his “coach” that he was no longer going to have anything to do with him in his – and OSU track’s – final year and that Karl was going to be doing his own workouts because, well, Karl wanted to win the national championship.  Karl’s quiet protest wasn’t entirely unprecedented; as a hunter as well as a runner he was known to warm up and show up for athlete introductions in a camo shirt and Levis over his skimpy shorts and singlet (a tradition that he started at Edmonds High School that still carries on today!).  

And it worked:  Karl had a great track season doing his own workouts – usually alone – and won races, including the Pac10 championships against the fast guys from U of O, Washington, and the Cal schools, and all of them were posting the some of the fastest times in the country as the NCAA championships loomed….at the storied Hayward Field in Eugene, where the likes of Bill Bowerman (who planted the seeds of success for U of O track domination, as well as a little company called Nike), the legendary Steve Prefontaine, under-appreciated former American record holder Jim Grelle, had torn up the track, and where multiple national championships, Olympic trials, and even World Championships have taken place.  

Karl cruised through the prelims, and then there was the final.  There were two U of O guys in the final, and while the hometown crowd of course were rooting for them, the knowledgeable crowd (reminded by the announcer) knew that Karl was going to be the last person to wear an Oregon State University jersey on the track, and was clearly a crowd favorite as well.   

The steeplechase is kind of an anomalous event:  a distance race that has “hurdles”, but these aren’t the ski-gate-kind of hurdles that the superfast folks rip over and knock over at a full sprint; in the steeplechase the hurdles are rightly called “barriers” since they are 4×4 beams supported by equally-stout stanchions, and they knock over people.  According to a fun article in the Deseret News describing BYU athletes’ incredible 2024 Olympic performance, the steeplechase “originated in 18th-century Ireland as a horse race from one town’s church steeple to another town’s church steeple. It has since been adapted to synthetic tracks and has become a staple of collegiate and professional track and field. The modern iteration consists of running 3,000 meters — 7½ laps, or just a hair under 2 miles — while hurdling 28 heavy barriers and seven water jumps.”   In that article too they talk about how difficult and technical it is, particularly when running in a pack, because your hurdle takeoff is dictated by those other folks all around you; the Ethiopian world record holder went down super hard in this year’s Oly final after catching his trailing leg on a barrier.  So it’s best to be either out front or behind the field in the steeple to get your steps correct for the hurdling….except for the important fact that either position is difficult, since people off the back rarely come all the way around for the win and people who lead entire races rarely usually expend too much energy and get outkicked for the win.  

But in the 1988 NCAA final, Karl Van Calcar was so primed and so confident in his fitness that he went out hard at gun and literally never looked back, and lap by lap he opened up another second on the rest of the field that after a few laps was clearly jockeying for second place. 

Again, U of O’s crowd is savvy, and they knew that they were watching something special.  Cheers here and there grew as Karl pounded out the laps and leaping effortlessly over the barriers, and with two laps to go the cheers became pounding as well, because – in an ode to Prefontaine, whose gutsy running kinda prompted it a generation earlier – people were pounding the floors of the stadium with their feet, for the first time in the entire NCAA meet.  When the bell rang for the final lap with Karl 6 or 7 seconds off the front and looking good, Hayward Field was in a full throated roar, which went until the last 30 meters when Karl finally glanced back, saw that he was safe, and broke into a wide grin and started waving at the crowd and it went to complete pandemonium!  

As the other guys stumbled in and there was the requisite sweaty handshakes and hugs, the meet’s announcer came back on and pretty much yelled for Karl to run a victory lap, which he did; a rarity at the NCAA’s, and Karl of course got a thunderous standing ovation.  

As for me, I was going nuts:  screaming my lungs out for him right down near the track, having left my seat up high to get down close.  As the euphoria of his inevitable win wound up, I happened to look around and whom did I see but the OSU coach who didn’t like me much and Karl had rejected, who somehow maintained his assholery by simply sitting there emotionless as Karl made history.  I couldn’t resist pretty much rushing over and screaming in his ear “Omigod!  This is incredible!”  I never saw him again.  

That night we partied it up back in Corvallis and every once in a while I’d yell:  “Karl!  You’re the National Fucking Champion!”  I was more excited than I probably woulda been had I won it myself, because of the challenges that he had and the long road that he’d taken to get there.  

The postscript is that indeed, the track program at OSU was cancelled and the track itself was made into yet another parking lot for the stupid football stadium, but…with a lot of work by Dick Oldfield – the track program at Oregon State is back….sort of? A women’s program was initiated around 2004, and a few years ago a young woman named Greta Van Calcar ended up being a strong OSU distance runner!  Karl kept competing despite taking a real job, and again it’s a testament to his brains, talent, and tenacity that he continued at the highest levels, making it onto a World Championship team and setting his ultimate personal record at the 1992 Olympic Trials; his 8:23 that he ran for 6th place woulda put him on most Olympic teams – including this year’s – but he happened to be in the most competitive steeplechase field in US Oly Trial history (and I believe was the only athlete to have a full time, unrelated job).  And fortunately for me, Ashley and I stay in pretty decent touch with him and his lovely wife Heidi and have visited their lovely little farm-ette in Palisade, CO just outside Grand Junction.  

Scott Davis – the announcer that day in 1988 –  has vivid memories of Karl’s race that he recounts here.  I loved that guy; there was a sprinter at Uof) named Jamin Assum   -pronounced “Hameen Ah-soom” but Scott Davis called him “Jammin’ Awesome!” and I don’t think anyone ever bothered to correct him!  And there’s another fun memory of Karl’s race on OregonLive.  Thanks again to Karl for a memorably fun run.