The best performance of the day, from an athletic point of view, was
Baltazzi's high jumping. He was in good form, and won the event by
clearing 5 ft. 7 in. Then he had the bar put up a quarter of an inch
above the interscholastic record mark of 5 ft. 9 in., and cleared it,
thus insuring for himself a record medal. The "take-off" was in bad
condition, and had to be constantly rolled. There were also several bad
holes along the runway. In addition to this, Baltazzi's right shoe
split, and afforded him almost no support. Nevertheless, he felt that he
could do even better than 5 ft. 9-1/4 in., and he had the bar raised to
5 ft. 11 in. He failed the first five times allowed him for a record
try, but on the sixth he got a good start, cleared the holes, and found
a solid spot to "take off" on, and cleared the stick as neatly and
gracefully as he ever did at 5 ft. 5 in. He had never before, even in
practice, done better than 5 ft. 10-1/2 in. Baltazzi goes to Columbia
next year, and will be a factor in the intercollegiates if he keeps in
his present form, which I have no doubt he will. I expect to see him go
beyond 6 feet inside of two years. He will doubtless be one of the
N.Y.A.C.'s representatives when the English athletes come over here this
year.
The records for the other field events, with the exception of throwing
the baseball and the broad jump, were broken. Ayres bettered the shot
record almost by a foot, and Irwin-Martin, in spite of his hard work in
the runs, threw 117 feet 4-1/2 inches with the hammer. A notable feature
of this event was that every place man in it surpassed the
interscholastic record, the third man bettering it as much as 3 feet.
This kind of work is most encouraging, and cannot fail to raise the
standard of the contestants, and create a most beneficial competition.
If a man knows he has got to break the record even to get third place,
there will be good work done. Cowperthwaite, as I had anticipated, won
the broad jump easily, but he should have gotten closer to the record
than he did. He covered 20 feet 8 inches. One of the other exciting and
unexpected features of the day was the semi-final in the Junior 100,
when Leech left the field about ten yards behind. He will make a good
man as his two easy victories over Wilson will attest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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