Abdel with Oregon teammates Aiden Smith and Simeon Birnbaum
Impressive Abdel result ranks him as a world class athlete
“DIFFERENT Class… Different Class!” as commentator Jimmy Magee described Maradona’s goal versus England at the 1986 World Cup.
The same analogy can be given to Abdel Laadjel’s performance in the NCAA Division 1 10km cross-country championship race at the Gans Creek cross-country course at Columbia, Missouri on Saturday.
Abdel came 9th of 261 starters; the best result by an Irish athlete in this prestigious championship race since 2012. The result confirmed the Donore Harriers man as the top-ranked Irish cross-country athlete Stateside this season.
Laadjel made a strong start, reaching the 1km mark in 7th place in 2.43.7.
With a huge front group, he dropped back to 33rd by the 3km point reached in 8.41.0 – but he was still only 1.5 seconds behind the leader George Couttie of Virginia Tech.
At half-way, reached in 14.25.8, he was up to 5th and hot on the heels of the then race leader Tayvon Kitchen of Brigham Young University.
He passed the 7km marker in 3rd place behind Joash Ruto of Iowa State with the race clock at 20.16.5.
With 1.5km remaining, the pre-race favourite Eritrean born Habtom Samuel (Washington State) made a winning move to the front and stretched out the leading athletes.
Abdel was running strong in 9th place passing 8km in 23.11.6 and 9km in 25.56.4. His final kilometre time of 2.49.9 compared well against the other leading athletes and he held 9th spot to the finish line reached in 28.46.3.
Abdel crossing the line
The race was won by Habtom Samuel in 28.33.9, with Rocky Hansen (Wake Forest) second in 28.38.0. Four of the 8 athletes who finished in front of Abdel are Kenyan internationals.
But Laadjel, aged 22, proved that he can mix it with the Kenyans! Indeed, 20 of the top 30 finishers were ‘Kenyans’, and he was only 6 seconds behind 3rd placed Solomon Kipchoge – a seasoned international athlete aged 29.
This result ranks Abdel as a ‘world-class’ athlete. He commented post-race: “I did myself justice for all the hard work in the race today.”
He certainly did! He recently won the Big 10 Conference cross-country race, and followed that up with 6th in the West Regional qualifiers, but this race is the premier cross-country race Stateside with a much higher density of top-class athletes.
To put this championship race into context, 32 teams and 260 athletes from the top-tier sports colleges from 9 regional qualifiers made up the start line.
Laadjel’s Oregon University Ducks team, having led in the early stages, fell back in the second-half of the race and had to settle for 5th place out of 32.
Abdel, who joined Donore Harriers in March of 2017 when a student at Kishoge Community College in Lucan, will now focus on the American indoor season. There’s a very realistic chance that he will break Eamonn Coghlan’s club records of 13.20.99 for the 5,000m and 7.48.7 for the 3,000m (indoors) set back in 1980 and 1979 respectively.
