On Spruce

Enclosed in the 40-by-120-yard transept of Dartmouth College's vast, cruciform gymnasium at Hanover, N. H. lies the fastest foot-racing track in the world. It was laid seven years ago on the college's 30-year-old indoor cinder track so that Dartmouth boys competing in big indoor meets could accustom themselves to board tracks. But in building it, Dartmouth's Buildings Superintendent Willard Gooding made a few constructive errors.

He selected solid spruce planking one and one-half inches thick instead of the one-inch boards ordinarily used in track building. On a framework of two-by-fours he conventionally laid the planks lengthwise along the straightaways, but set them unconventionally across the course at the turns. He banked the turns at a 30DEG angle instead of the ordinary 20DEG.

To Dartmouth's grey, veteran Track Coach Harry Hillman, onetime Olympic runner, the result has since been more headache than help. Year after year on the springy spruce track, his athletes stepped off more remarkable times in practice, were beaten in unremarkable time in competition elsewhere. Last March, to find out just how much faster Dartmouth's track was than those in other sports arenas, he invited the great Glenn Cunningham to race over it. No official world record could be hung up, because the International Amateur Athletic Federation recognizes only outdoor performances. Cunningham amazed everybody with a 4:04.4 mile, the fastest ever run by man, two seconds under British Sydney Charles Wooderson's world record. Unsure of the track, Cunningham ran his second quarter in a slow 64 seconds; later he figured he could have run the distance safely two seconds faster.

Cunningham's feat encouraged Dartmouth to try again. Last week the middle-distance flash of the season, Negro Portrait Painter & Student John Borican of Columbia University, who week before had jumped the gun to beat Glenn Cunningham in Manhattan in the fastest 1,000 yards ever run, went to Dartmouth to see how fast he could run 800 meters and the half-mile (880 yards). Spaced out to pace him were four Dartmouth runners with handicaps of from 10 to 95 yards. Careful was Borican this time to be off with the gun and not before. He turned off the quarter in a sweet 52.4, overhauled the pacers one by one, raced on to break the 800-meter tape in 1:49.2, the half-mile tape 5.1 yards farther on in 1:49.8.

This time clipped 1.6 seconds off the great Lloyd Hahn's indoor half-mile record of 1 :51.4 set in 1928, but Borican was dissatisfied. Said he: "I think I could have taken two seconds off my time tonight if I had . . . someone in front of me on the last lap."

Two seconds off his time would have bettered every 800-meter and 880-yard mark in the books. The official 800-meter world record of 1:49.6 is held by Elroy Robinson, but is about to be replaced by Sydney Wooderson's 1:48.4 of last summer.* For the half mile, Wooderson's 1:49.2 is the pending record.

Wooderson is a frail-looking London solicitor whom the British fondly call "Leather Legs." Main chance U. S. runners have at his three world records is over the ultra-fast cinder track in Princeton's Palmer Stadium, where Cunningham, Ben Eastman and New Zealand's Jack Lovelock all set previous world records.

*The fastest 800 meters ever run was Negro John Youie Woodruff's at Billy Rose's Pan-American Olympics at the Texas Centennial in Dallas two years ago. His time was 1:47.8, but measurers later found the track five feet short. This probably had little to do with Woodruff's time, since he is a high & wide runner, and not a rail hugger like Cunningham, but his performance could not be submitted for world record consideration.

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