Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

312 Track Athletics forty yards. Even " Lon " Meyers, who was not essentially a runner of the "trick" distances, is credited, not without some slight doubt of authen– ticity, with a record of st seconds for fifty yards. It is very rare that the men who are particularly good at these short distances succeed in running the whole hundred yards. A. H. Green of Har– vard, '92, who, for example, was the fastest man at the very short distances at Cambridge in his day, never did as well on cinders as he did on boards, and the best he could do for the whole hundred yards was 10-! seconds. In fact, a peculiar sort of combination of nervous energy and running "action" seems to be required for these distances, and clever performances at them are due more to the spring that a jumper uses than to the steady stride of the sprinter. Of the two preeminent sprinters of the present generation the performances of Wefers have been somewhat lost sight of, followed so soon and eclipsed as they were by the record-breaking running of Arthur Duffey. And yet not even Duffey was as fast as Wefers in the longer sprint and for all-round consistent work at the short dis– tances, and leaving out Duffey's record-breaking hundred, it is not altogether easy to give com– plete preeminence to the younger son of George– town. Wefers was a man of large physique, as strong above the waist as below it, and in athletic