Lambert Smashes School Record in Debut

As Harvard junior sprinter Chris Lambert lined up for his first collegiate race at Saturday’s tri-meet with Brown and Cornell, competitors and spectators alike turned their full attention to the 60-meter track in anticipation of an extraordinary performance.

They all expected that Lambert, a fourth-place finisher at U.K. Nationals and a bronze medallist at the 2001 World University Games, would blow away his current competitors.

He did that and then some.

Lambert’s pace was even with the five other preliminary competitors for the first several meters, but his burgeoning lead through the final meters was an unprecedented sight in the history of 60-meter races at Gordon Indoor Track.

His finish of 6.79 seconds crushed the previous Harvard school record of 6.93 seconds. Lambert then broke his own record by finishing the final race in 6.78 seconds.

In both the preliminaries and the final, Lambert beat out Brown junior Brandon Buchanan, the defending Heptagonal champion in the event.

Lambert’s debut was the shining moment of an otherwise dismal meet for the Harvard men’s track team, whose 49.5 points easily outdistanced Brown’s 33 for second place, but fell well short of Cornell’s 87.5.

“I’ve been waiting for two years for this,” Lambert said. “It was a good occasion.”

Lambert had stayed out of collegiate competition for his first two years because he believed that the Harvard training regiment conflicted with his personal training program, which allowed him to peak for elite summer competitions. His long-awaited presence on the track this weekend was uplifting for the team.

“Chris is definitely a welcome addition to our team,” co-captain John Cinelli said. “He’s an extremely talented runner. Just having him on the track boosts our morale and makes everyone better.”

Though Lambert is a world-class runner in the 100, he has had little experience running indoors in the 60. His current time is short of what he would need to even meet the NCAA provisional qualifying standard of 6.72 seconds. Lambert said that even if he were to qualify for Indoor NCAAs, he would not compete because his focus is on the outdoor season.

Junior Alasdair McLean-Foreman, a longtime teammate of Lambert’s with the Belgrave Harriers club in Britain, won the 1000 in 2:28.99. The 1000 had not been his usual race, but he won convincingly nonetheless.

“He just looked like he wasn’t trying very hard, but he still had a great race,” Cinelli said. “Whether he runs in the 800, the 1000, or the mile, he’ll be a force in this league.”

McLean-Foreman typically ran the 800 last season, but he has decided to focus on the mile this year. This coming weekend, he will compete in the Mayo Invitational at Notre Dame, where he hopes to run a four-minute mile. That mark would qualify him to compete at NCAAs.

“My coaches have always told me that I’m more of a mile athlete than an 800 athlete,” McLean-Foreman said.

The other Harvard athletes to win their events last weekend were junior John Traugott in the 800, sophomore Tekky Andrew-Jaja in the high jump and senior Shawn Parker in the 60-meter hurdles. Parker’s time of 8.17 seconds would be enough to place him highly in Heps in any season.

Cinelli came close to joining the list of winners in the mile, but he was edged out by Brown senior Scott MacDonald by two-hundredths of a second. Cinelli said that his plan was to go out with the leaders and make a move as he approached the final lap, but MacDonald caught him in the end.

“I think I made my move a little too early,” Cinelli said. “In hindsight if I had waited I would probably have had a better chance, but it’s tough to make that judgment when you’re out there.”

Brown won just one other event on Saturday, while Cornell won nine to dominate the meet. The Big Red was especially strong in the field where it won both throwing events, the long jump and the triple jump.

“It was kind of wakeup call that tells us that Cornell’s a team we have to take seriously come Heps,” Cinelli said.

The results were also skewed a bit by the absence of Harvard co-captain Kobie Fuller, who set a school indoor record in the 400 in his most recent meet. Fuller was unable to compete due to a tight hamstring.

The next meet for the team, minus McLean-Foreman, will be the Greater Boston Championships hosted by Boston University. The meet should feature most of the top collegians from Boston area schools, which get to choose four competitors for each event.