From the time he was 15, Rudy Chapa drove himself through life without a rearview mirror.
Victories, records weren’t moments to linger on, weren’t times for reflection. No matter how big the triumph, how fast the time, there was always something bigger, something faster to chase further on up the road.
“Stuff didn’t stick,” Chapa said. “It was almost as soon as you did something, it was, ‘OK, what’s next?’ The focus just goes to that.”
And so Chapa, a former NCAA champion and American record-setting distance runner at Oregon, the most talented American distance runner of his generation, perhaps any generation, has spent the decades in a sense a stranger in his own life story, races that so many connected with and can recall like they happened an hour ago, the roar of Eugene’s Hayward Field seemingly still ringing in their ears all these years later are invisible to him, a blur at best, his inability to remember his greatest days with any detail so complete that at times he has even questioned the accounts of eye witnesses.
Chapa found himself on a stage at Nike’s world headquarters one afternoon in 2008 sitting next to Phil Knight, the company’s billionaire co-founder, Tinker Hatfield, a Duck pole vaulter turned designer of the Air Jordan shoe line, and Mac Wilkins, the Olympic discus champion, as Geoff Hollister, one of Nike’s earliest and most influential employees, read from “Out of Nowhere,” his autobiography which also traced the brands rise to global prominence.
At one point, Hollister read a passage that recounted how Chapa, in custom-made Nike spikes, set the American 3,000-meter record in May 1979 and then climbed up into Hayward Field’s West Grandstand to embrace the parents of the previous record-holder, his boyhood idol, the late Steve Prefontaine.
“And I was on stage, and I was like, ‘I don’t remember that happening,’” Chapa said. “But there was a tiny bit of me, ‘Yeah, something like that might have happened.’ I became obsessed, did that happen or not? I went into the archives and it was reported, yeah, I’d done it. But that’s how, it seems really odd, but yeah, my performances came and went from a memory standpoint.”
One performance endures a half-century later, a record so unchallenged through the years that even its owner’s faulty memory cannot erase it.
On April 24, 1976, 50 years ago this week, Chapa, an 18-year-old senior at Indiana’s Hammond High School, ran 10,000 meters (6.2 miles) at the Drake Relays in Des Moines in 28 minutes, 32.8 seconds, nearly eight seconds under the qualifying standard for that summer’s Olympic Games in Montreal, shattering the national high school record and setting a world junior record. No teenager, not from Spokane or Orange County, Kenya or Ethiopia, Great Britain or East Germany, anywhere on the planet had ever run faster over 10,000 meters than Chapa did that day.
Fifty-years later Chapa’s mark still stands as the oldest national high school track record on the books, a standard so far ahead of its time that no prep runner has been able to break 29 minutes since.
“One really odd thing about me in particular for whatever reason when it comes to event where I would say I did well, I don’t know why, but those memories are like blocked,” Chapa said this week. “I don’t remember. Whether it was winning the (NCAAs) or when I set the American record I remember nothing about that.”For the (NCAAs) I remember meeting Mr. Prefontaine and what I remember about that is how blue his eyes were. And so you can ask me all sorts of questions, I don’t remember. And the same is true with the 3,000. For whatever reason, I just block that sort of stuff out.”
Chapa paused for a moment and laughed.
“I can remember every detail of when I failed. I can remember everything. I can still see Sydney Maree’s feet leave me with 300 to go in Champaign, where he just destroyed me in the 5,000,” he continued, referring to a loss to Villanova’s Maree, a future world record holder in the 1,500, in the 1979 NCAA 5,000 final in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. “But I don’t remember the victories.”
Chapa is hesitant to talk about his prep 10,000 record, insisting the mark’s longevity is due more to the infrequency the top high school runners now run the distance than his performance.
“It’s a record that sits out, exists because kids aren’t targeting it,” he said. “If they did, there’s not one doubt in my mind that not only would it be broken easily, but that kids would probably be running better than 28 minutes right now if they decided to focus on it. And I quite frankly would have loved to have seen somebody take it down.
“I don’t mean to say the record wasn’t a significant one. Clearly running 28:32 in high school is impressive, a really impressive performance. But when I see what kids have done, kids have run 13:25 (for 5,000) and to me that converts to quite a bit faster than the 10k effort.
It is not a view widely shared or supported by history.
Galen Rupp won a silver medal at 10,000 at the 2012 Olympic Games in London and four years later claimed a bronze in the Olympic marathon in Rio de Janeiro. As a senior at Portland’s Central Catholic High School he set U.S. high school records at 2,000 and 3,000 meters and took nearly seven seconds off Gerry Lindgren’s 40-year-old national prep 5,000 record. Yet running in a pro race in Europe after that senior high school season in 2004, Rupp came up more than 36 seconds off of Chapa’s time.
Edward Cheserek won so many NCAA titles at Oregon (17) that he was anointed “King Ches.” At New Jersey’s St. Benedict Prep, he broke Lindgren’s then 49-year-old national high school indoor two-mile record. His high school 10,000 personal best, however, was nearly 70 seconds off Chapa’s record.
“Running 14:15s (for 5,000 meters) back to back as a high schooler and you’re still growing, I think is one of the best, if not the best, record still out there,” said Justin Loftus, head coach at Oregon’s Crater High School, one of the nation’s top prep programs. “It’s probably one of, if not the most impressive out there because the commitment, the dedication, the miles, actually getting a point in time that you can run that fast, all has to align.”
Oregon’s Bill Dellinger coached Prefontaine and at least 21 sub-4 minute milers. His athletes set more than two dozen American records and established U.S. records at eight distances, 2,000 meters and the marathon, the 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 standards set by multiple athletes.
One runner, however, stood out from the rest.
“Dellinger always said Rudy was his most talented runner,” said Art Boileau, a former Oregon standout, two-time Olympian for Canada and Boston Marathon runner-up. “Chapa was off the charts.”
April 24 is a reminder of just how far off the charts Chapa was both at Hammond and Oregon. It is also a painful reminder of a career cut short by injury just as he seemed to be on the brink of Olympic glory and threatening world records.
“Chapa was incredible,” Boileau said. “Then, it’s could of, would of, should of. And then you think, get Rudy in these super shoes they have today, God knows what he would have run for 10k.
“He was just a super talent.”
The 50th anniversary of Chapa’s record is also cause to look back on the triumphs and heartbreak of a trio of teenagers, the working class kid from the Indiana mill town 29 miles and a few light years from the Chicago that lays across Lake Michigan on the horizon, the feisty Oregonian who grew up in the shadows of the sport’s most storied venue, and the the world champion from Orange County, the three of them on an Olympian quest that captured the attention and the imagination of their sport through the first half of 1976.
“The whole thing was kind of magical,” said Dan Candiano, Chapa’s coach at Hammond High.
Chapa began running as a way to get in shape for wrestling.
“He never saw the mat (in high school),” Candiano said.
Instead, Candiano, a self-proclaimed rebel and former miler at DePaul, then in his mid-20s, recognized Chapa’s running talent and took him under his wing.
By his sophomore year, he was running as much as 120 miles a week.
“I’m sure there were plenty of times when I exceeded that. I know that every morning I was out the door at 6 and back to my house between 7:25 and 7:30,” Chapa said. “So it was like an hour and a half every morning, every single morning. I missed maybe one or two days when I got sick, but even when I was sick, I ran.”
Hammond High didn’t have a track, so afternoon workouts were done at a track at a nearby junior high or laps around a 3/4-mile loop at Maywood Park.
“Monday’s workout was one lapper,” Chapa said. “Tuesday’s was a two-lapper, Friday, a four-lapper.”
“It was intense,” Candsiano said. “We put in a lot of mileage, 365 days a year.” But he also told his runners that “Everything is easy after this.”
Candiano’s methods delivered significant results. In 1975, eight high school runners broke 9 minutes for two miles. Three of them were from Hammond: Chapa, the former wrestler (8 minutes, 52.6 seconds), and seniors Tim Keough, an ex-pole vaulter (8:52.8) and a cocky former football player Carey Pinkowski (8:56.2).
It was the first time in U.S. history that three runners from the same high school had broken the 9:00 barrier in the same season, an achievement that led to the trio being featured in the pages of Sports Illustrated.
Chapa made his 10,000 meter debut as Hammond junior at the 1975 U.S. Junior (Under 20) Championships in Knoxville that June in a showdown with Laguna Beach star Eric Hulst, also a junior, and South Eugene sophomore Bill McChesney that had American track buzzing for weeks.
The trio didn’t disappoint, producing what Track & Field News called “the greatest prep 6 (Mile)/10,000 race ever run.”
Hulst was an upset winner as a sophomore in the 10,000 in the U.S. Juniors vs. Soviet Union Juniors dual meet the previous summer in Austin, Texas. He arrived in Tennessee coming off an epic victory in the CIF State Championship two-mile over Loara’s Ralph Serna, the 1974 U.S. junior champion at 5,000 meters, 8:44.9 to 8:45.9.
McChesney had knocked 20 seconds off Hulst’s national sophomore class six-mile record with a 28:58.8 clocking at the Oregon Invitational, a college meet, that March. Also in the Knoxville race was Thom Hunt out of San Diego’s Patrick Henry High School. Hunt would go on to knock nearly four seconds off the national indoor mile record the following February, then, as an Arizona freshman, he won the World Junior Cross Country title in February 1977.
“My plan was to stay in reach for four miles and see what I had left,” Chapa told reporters after the Knoxville race. “This is my first race at this distance. I really didn’t know what to expect.”
It soon became clear that Hulst would hammer out a hard pace from the start just as he had in his State two-mile duel with Serna, with the aim of dropping his rivals one by one and taking the sting out of the kick of those brave enough or strong enough to hold on.
“We get to the track and it’s about 90 degrees about 90 percent humidity, and then right before the race, there was a five-minute rain shower and the temperature dropped 20 degrees and the humidity dropped and that race went off,” said Jim Toomey, the Laguna Beach coach.
The drop in temperature allowed Hulst to drive a pace that threatened Gerry Lindgren’s 11-year-old long thought to be unbreakable national 10,000 record of 29:17.2. Lindgren, then a recent graduate of Spokane’s Rogers High School, set the mark with a stunning upset in the U.S.-Soviet Union dual meet in July 1964 before a reported 105,000 people at the Coliseum and a national television audience.
Lindgren had started the race with a personal best more than 30 seconds slower than Soviet veterans Leonid Ivanov and Nikolay Dutov, yet ended up winning by more than 22 seconds, U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy cheering him on.
Lindgren’s victory at the height of the Cold War was the first win by an American in the event in the U.S.-Soviet meet series and made the 18-year-old a national celebrity. Two months later, Lindgren made the U.S. Olympic team for the 1964 Games in Tokyo.
“Young Lindgren seized America’s imagination as few other runners have ever done when he defeated the grizzled Russians, Leonid Ivanov and Nikolay Dutov,” wrote Amateur Athlete magazine.
Now Hulst, with Chapa and McChesney holding on, was chasing something almost as unthinkable.
“When we raced,” Serna said, “Eric and I were playing poker with our cards faced up, basically saying Eric is going to go out hard and fast and try and take the kick out of me as he did with Chapa. And Chapa did the same thing I did, which is to try and hang on and use his better leg speed to hopefully out-sprint Eric.
“They were basically just throwing it down,” continued Serna, who competed in the meet in the 1,500 and 5,000. “Everyone in the crowd was amazed at the one-mile mark, at the three-mile mark, at the four-mile mark, at what was happening. And that neither of them would give up and that was the most amazing thing that I’d ever seen.
“Twenty-five laps of these guys just playing it with their cards faced up and there was no big secret on how they were going to try and strategize. It was amazing, and seeing McChesney, this sophomore, running right behind them, running this phenomenal race that normally would have won.
“He was in their wake, just trying to survive.”
After 24 laps, the six-mile mark, Hulst had dropped all but Chapa as they were clocked in 28:22.8, a second under Lindgren’s national six-mile mark set on the way to his victory against the Soviets.
“I remember as they came through the six-mile point en route and watching them, they were literally running shoulder to shoulder,” Serna said. “Eric slightly in the lead, but they were given the same time at the six-mile mark.”
It remained just as tight down the backstretch and onto the final straight.
“The race could not have been any closer and I was actually really surprised that Eric was able to stay with Rudy that last stretch because I knew Rudy had much more leg speed and Eric just gutted it out,” Serna said.
“What I do remember is the last lap because we were together, a group of us together for quite a long ways, and I don’t remember when Eric and I broke from Billy and Thom Hunt,” Chapa said. “That last 400, I think we split like 56 seconds.
“It came down to two guys just really wanting to win, and I think he took on me, and then it was just like all out, doing whatever, it came down to the last stretch, I think I won by inches.”
Indeed, Chapa was given the victory in a photo finish with both he and Hulst clocked in 29:11.2, six seconds under Lindgren’s record.
“Eric was extremely tired, extremely happy,” Toomey recalled. “And he said, ‘Coach I…’ and I said, ‘There’s nothing to say, you just broke the six-mile record and you lost the 10k. So it wasn’t a bad day.’ That was it.””I didn’t know what to expect in terms of the time,” Chapa says now. “I was just trying to be competitive.”
McChesney finished 29:27.2, a world record for 16-year-olds. Hunt was seventh in 29:46.0. All told, 10 records from national high school to U.S. class and age records were set in the race.
Perhaps what Chapa remembers most about Knoxville was watching Pinkowski run in the 5,000 the following day and noticing an awkward looking runner from suburban Boston — Alberto Salazar.
“What I do remember was the next day, the 5000 and watching that terrific race, watching Alberto run because he’s such an odd looking runner,” Chapa said of his future Oregon teammate and close friend. “I remember thinking, look at that kid, he’s hanging in there, he doesn’t look like he should be, but he never gave up and that I remember vividly, watching this ridiculously skinny kid bent over and thinking, wow, that’s really cool.”
Salazar finished second and joined Chapa and Hulst in the U.S.-Soviet Union Juniors dual meet the following month in Lincoln, Nebraska. This time with the temperature in the 90s, Chapa pulled away on the last lap winning in 31:06.0 with Hulst second in 31:09.8.
“What we all had accomplished in Knoxville and the next year was the Olympic year with the Olympic Trials, we were thinking of the standard,” Chapa said.
To qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials that June in Eugene, athletes had to meet the Olympic Games qualifying standard. For the 10,000 the standard was 28:40.0, more than 30 seconds faster than Chapa and Hulst ran in Knoxville.
“And I think all of us looked at that time 28:40 and were gunning for it,” Chapa said, referring to Hulst and McChesney. “I know from my perspective, I wasn’t thinking I want to run faster than those guys. I was thinking I want to qualify for the Olympic Trials and my guess is they were probably thinking the same way.”
It was Candiano who pushed Chapa to focus on the 10,000 in 1976.
“We concentrated on the 10,000 because we thought it was his greatest chance to qualify,” Candiano said. “I didn’t think he was fast enough for the mile or the 5,000. But he put in a lot of miles. I thought he had a shot at making the team, I really did.
“The biggest goal was to qualify.”
But with Pinkowski now running at Villanova, Keough competing for Arizona State, Chapa found himself training by himself around Maywood Park.
“The hardest part is he had to train on his own,” Candiano said. “He had no one to run with anymore.”
Chapa, however, was not alone in his quest to reach the Olympic Trials. To cover the expense of sending Chapa to high-level meets against the nation’s top college and post-collegiate runners, “Send Rudy To The Olympics” signs were placed all over Hammond. The campaign raised $1,500.
“I was very grateful for that support,” Chapa said.
“The whole community got behind it,” Candiano said. “It was pretty neat.”
During a recruiting trip to Oregon that January, Chapa finally found someone to run with. Dellinger’s hardest workouts of the week were on early Saturday mornings.
Chapa hopped into part of the interval workout at Hayward Field. Toward the end of the practice, McChesney showed up. South Eugene High School was just a mile and a half from Hayward Field and McChesney’s two older brothers, Tom, the 1974 U.S. Jr. 3,000-meter steeplechase champion, and Steve, were members of the Ducks team.
“Billy says wanna go for a run?” Chapa recalled. So McChesney took his Midwest rival on a tour of Tracktown USA.
McChesney at the Oregon Invitational at Hayward Field on March 20 was the first of the trio to take a crack at the Olympic standard that spring. McChesney fell short but still managed to lower the national high school record to 29:06.8, passing six miles 28:09.4, also a new U.S. prep record.
Six days later, it was Chapa’s turn at the Florida Relays in Gainesville against a field of college and post-grad runners. Chapa covered the first two miles in 9:10, a 28:29 pace, but eventually the aggressive early pace and heat and humidity took their toll. Realizing he wasn’t going to hit the Olympic standard, Chapa eased back, finishing in 29:09.4, still a personal best.
Two days later, Hulst was up. A month earlier, he won the juniors race at the World Cross Country Championships in Wales, his one-two finish with Hunt leading Team USA to a 44-point victory over second-place Spain. Now running in UCI’s Meet of Champions, Hulst became the first prep and the first world junior (under 20) runner to break the 29:00 barrier, regaining the national record with a 28:54.8 mark, picking up the six-mile standard as well (27:58.0).
Back in Indiana, Chapa and Candiano turned their attention to the Drake Relays in Des Moines on April 24.
“When we went to Drake we knew it was his last opportunity,” Candiano said.
“For me, it was kind of crazy by that time Candiano had me focusing on the mile and not the two mile (in high school meets) and also I was anchor leg on the mile relay,” Chapa said. “So it was an odd thing to go from running the mile and 800 to jumping up and doing the 10k.”
But he was boosted by an interval workout in the days leading up to Drake. Candiano had Chapa do 2 x 1 mile. Chapa covered the first mile in 4:15 and then followed up with a 4:16.
“I remember telling him, ‘Ah, I think you’re ready,’” Candiano said laughing. “He would have broken the national two-mile record had we concentrated on it.”
There were tornado warnings in Des Moines the morning of the race, but by the time the runners stepped to the starting line for the 10,000, a heavy rain and strong winds had stopped and the race went off in a cool mist.
“You’ve got a heck of a field here,” Candiano told his runner. “Just hang on as long as you can.”
Chapa nodded.
“I’m sure I was nervous,” he said. “The only thing I really remember about prepping for the race was being in the race was just the importance of not getting broken. I had no idea what it was going to be like. I remember running the race in Gainesville and there were far better runners in the (Drake) race than that race and so it was really just about relaxing and not being broken.”
Garry Bjorklund, a former NCAA six-mile champion at Minnesota, and Glenn Herold, an ex-Wisconsin All-American, led through two miles in 9:04.2 with Chapa part of the lead group. Canadian Chris McCubbins led a six-man group that included Chapa through three miles in 13:40.8, 28:20 pace for 10,000.”The six-man field, or as someone cracked, five men and a boy,” Track & Field News wrote at the time. “But Chapa was running like a man, staying right with the leaders.”
He was still there as the group passed four miles in 18:16.8. It wasn’t until the final laps, when Arizona’s Ed Mendoza broke open the race, that Chapa lost contact with the leaders. Mendoza went on to win in 28:23.2 followed by Bjorklund at 28:27.2. Both Mendoza and Bjorklund would make the Olympic team and compete in the Montreal Games, Bjorklund reaching the final.
Chapa held on to pass six miles in 27:36.4, a new national record, and then finish fifth, his 28:32.8, nearly eight seconds under the Olympic standard. It was a new national high school record and world junior record by more than 20 seconds.
“He just hung on,” Candiano said. The coach remembers feeling a “big relief.”
Having a similar emotion is one of the clear memories Chapa has of that day.
“And it was 50 year ago,” he said. “That one was a big deal. When there’s so much attention put on it, like raising the money and I felt a real sense of obligation (to the people in Hammond) and just the weight off my shoulders and having done it was a big deal.
“It was quite meaningful to set a bar so high and to be lucky enough …” he continued, his thoughts shifting gears. “And it really was, it was like the perfect race, perfect weather and it just happened.”
A clearer memory of the weekend for Chapa is that Candiano drove back to Indiana with Chapa’s parents, so he got to drive his coach’s sports car from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport back to Hammond.
Hulst took one more shot at the qualifying for the Olympic Trails, leading the AAU national championships race at UCLA before fading and finishing 29:30.6. It had been a long season.
“He just ran out of gas,” Toomey said.
That fall, Hulst joined Serna and miler Steve Scott at UC Irvine, the trio leading the Anteaters to the 1976 NCAA Division II cross country title. But suffering from a chronic knee injury, Hulst never again reached the heights he had as a prep and dropped out of college as a sophomore. He tried to return to racing in the early 80s, but again couldn’t regain the form he showed in chasing the Olympic standard. He finished 28th in the 1982 Boston Marathon, his last major race.
Hulst died a decade later, in June 1992, after a 17-month battle with brain cancer. He was 34.
Chapa won the mile at the Indiana state meet, running 4:05.4, the nation’s fastest outdoor high school mile that season, but like Hulst, was running on empty by June. He ran 30:36.4 in the Olympic Trials qualifying rounds in Eugene and failed to advance to the final.
“I’ve been running twice-a-day workouts since I was a sophomore,” Chapa told reporters after his Drake Relays race. “Some people think I might burn myself out. But Frank Shorter has been running hard quite a few years at a high level. I’ll just have to see.”
Chapa and Salazar’s idea of running hard would change when they arrived in Eugene in the fall of 1976. Chapa’s 120-mile weeks at Hammond were replaced by Dellinger’s training system that emphasized lower miles but more intensity and interval training year-round.
“The biggest shock in the world when I came to Eugene on my recruiting trip and Dellinger sat me down and he goes, ‘This is what I present to guys,’ this is one (training schedule) sheet, all seven days. And he had Monday, five miles in the morning, shake out run, and then five miles afternoon, you know, easy but finish with 30/30s,” Chapa said, referring to a workout where a runner runs eight to 16 200s in 30 seconds with 30 seconds rest in between. “And you add the whole week up and, ‘wow that’s 70 miles a week.’ For Alberto, it was like ‘Whoa, going up to 70 miles a week’ (from 60 miles a week). For me, it was like man, this doesn’t make sense and I went with it. Intensity way up.
“That was a dramatic shift for me. But yeah, I bought in.”
And Dellinger’s system quickly paid off for Chapa. He was ninth at the NCAA Cross Country Championships that November, one of only three Americans in a top 10 dominated by older foreign runners. Kenyans Henry Rono and Samson Kimobwa of Washington State went one-two. Kimobwa would set the 10,000 world record the following summer, only to have Rono break it in 1978 during a four-month spree in which he set world records at four different distances. Providence’s John Treacy, the fifth-place finisher at NCAAs, went on to win the 1978 and 1979 World Cross Country titles for Ireland.
“Started off with a bang and ended with a real thud,” Chapa said of his freshman year.
He ran 8:35.8 for two miles in a meet in Eugene shortly before the NCAA track and field championships.
“They are tough,” Oregon All-American Dave Taylor said of Chapa and Salazar that spring. “They haven’t had to go through any of the transition that most freshmen do. They have the right attitude and just know they can do it.”
Taylor spoke too soon.
Chapa wanted to run the 5,000 at the 1977 NCAAs in Champaign-Urbana
“I just felt I was really ready to run fast over 5,000,” he said. “I ran the (8:35.8) comfortably, easy, just kind of run through it.”
Dellinger wanted him to run the 10,000.
“I didn’t like the idea of it because I just didn’t think I was ready because my mileage dropped dramatically from high school to college,” Chapa said. “So I just didn’t think of myself as being ready. So on the flight to O’Hare, I asked to sit down with him to talk to him, and I made my case, and he goes, “Rudy, you’re running the 10,000 and you’re going to run well. So don’t worry about it.’”
But Chapa did worry.
“So part of me thinking I wasn’t ready and I never ran well in heat and humidity,” Chapa said. “But more than anything else, I think I just talked myself out of it.”
He finished 13th.
“And I ended up bombing out,” Chapa said. “I got lapped, and it was like the first time home. And very embarrassing. And the other guy who bombed the Nationals was Matt Centrowitz, who a year before had made the Olympic team. And I’ll never forget Dellinger coming into our room and talking to us, and after he said a few things to Matt, he said, “and you quit, and you can never quit in a race.’ And it was the first time anyone other than family, my parents, had ever criticized me. And it cut really deep. I thought it was really unfair. I didn’t think I quit. And I was so upset at that conversation that I decided I wasn’t going to come back. I was prepared to go to Indiana, and I was just gonna study, trying to get into med school.”
Chapa asked his parents to pay his way through IU. Candiano heard about Chapa’s plans and alerted Dellinger.
Eventually, Candiano, Dellinger and Chapa’s parents talked him into going back to Oregon in the fall.
“Back when he was being recruited, my wife and I wanted him to go to Wisconsin or Indiana, where he would be close to home and we could see him run,” Rodolpho Chapa, Rudy’s father, told the Eugene Register-Guard’s Blaine Newnham in 1978. “But he said to me, ‘If you want me to be a good runner, let me go to Oregon where I can compete against the best.
“I told him, ‘Sure, I will finance your education if you want to go to another school, but don’t you want to be a good runner anymore?’ I reminded him of what he had said a year before, he talked to his high school coach, and he talked to Coach Dellinger.
“Then Rudy changed his mind.”
But Dellinger’s comments continued to sting.
“Years and years later, maybe in the last 10 years, I remember talking to Coach Dellinger and telling him how much that hurt,” Chapa said, “but that he was right, that I had quit.”
“You know what happened? He was critical of me two times my entire time at Oregon,” Chapa told the Southern California News Group last year. “And you know that, because I wasn’t coming back, and I used to work in the steel mills in the summer for three years, it was hard to run, and since I wasn’t coming back, I didn’t run much that summer, going into my sophomore year, and then I didn’t run a good race at nationals in cross country. We won, but when we left the course, we thought we finished second, and it wasn’t until, like, I think later in the day that we were declared champs. But I’ll never forget we were driving back from the course thinking we had finished second, and he looked back at me, and he says, ‘Hey, I hope next summer you decide to run.’ That was a killer.”
Chapa re-dedicated himself that spring and eventually, he recalled, “My relationship with (Dellinger) just became very strong. And I don’t remember him ever saying something like, ‘Hey, you’re really coming along.’”
But after a workout that spring, Dellinger spotted Chapa in the hallway in McArthur Court and asked Chapa to meet him in the coaches’ locker area. Dellinger pulled out Prefontaine’s Oregon sweatshirt.
“And he goes, ‘I want you to have this. You should have it,’” Chapa said. “And the fact that he decided to let me have it was really meaningful.”
Chapa showed his appreciation by winning the NCAA 5,000 in June 1978 before a raucous, packed-to-the-rafters Hayward Field, lapping some of the nation’s top runners in the process.
“There were only the names of three runners the crowd at Hayward ever chanted. The first one was Pre, “Go Pre Go!’” said Boileau, Chapa’s roommate for a year at Oregon. “The other two were Rudy and (1984 Olympic 800-meter champion) Joaquim Cruz.
“I can still hear that ‘Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!”
Chapa was walking across the Hayward infield with his father after the meet when he was stopped by a middle-aged man in blue ball cap with his green shirt sleeves who introduced himself and asked him to sign his program. The man was Ray Prefontaine, Pre’s dad.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Rodolpho Chapa told Prefontaine.
“You know, Rudy looks like another runner I know,” Prefontaine said.
The elder Prefontaine wasn’t alone in his opinion. The sport, the media, especially Prefontaine’s legion of fans who called themselves “Pre’s People” had been searching for his heir, the “next Pre,” since he had died in an automobile accident in May 1975.
Chapa was asked by a reporter after his NCAA victory if the Hayward faithful were now his “people.” “No,” Chapa responded. “They’re Oregon’s people.”
But the “next Pre” talk only increased through the spring of 1979 as Chapa broke Prefontaine’s school record in the 5,000, becoming the first American collegian to break 13:20. and then claimed Pre’s U.S. 3,000 record.
“I remember Dellinger being very protective with me,” Chapa said. “Somebody had asked Dellinger that question, ‘Is Rudy the next Pre?’ And Bill was like, ‘No, Rudy has no interest in being the next Pre. He just wants to be him.’ And Dellinger never, ever compared me to Prefontaine, nor made me feel like that’s something, a burden that I should carry, and I always respected that, because that was his attitude, just be who you are.”
Chapa’s 7:37.7 American record in the 3,000, knocked nearly five seconds off Prefontaine’s previous U.S. standard and was the fourth fastest time in history, the equivalent of an 8:13.9 two-mile.
But Chapa had already moved on.
“I think I’m capable of running 13:13-13:12 for the 5,000,” Chapa told reporters after the race. “If I can do that, well, then I’ll go on to the next step and think about the world record.”
Marty Liquori’s American record at the time was 13:15.1. Rono’s world record was 13:08.4.”I do know when I did my 7:37, I wanted to make my next 5,000 race one where I would go through 3k in 7:45 just to see what would happen,” Chapa said this week. A pace of 7:45 for 3,000 is 12:55 pace for 5,000.
Chapa’s next 5,000 was the NCAA Championships once again in Champaign-Urbana. Chapa and Dellinger’s confidence was further bolstered by Chapa’s meet record-setting 3:38.7 1,500-meter win at the Pac-10 Championships two weeks before NCAAs. The conference had produced more sub-4:00 milers, multiple Olympians, American record-holders and world leaders than any other league, but none had run faster in the conference championships than Chapa. Seventy minutes later, Chapa came back on a hot night in Tempe to hang with a fresh Rono until the final meters of the Pac-10 5,000.
But then the day before the NCAA 5,000 heats, Chapa twisted his ankle. Salazar said it sounded like a firecracker going off and that it swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. Chapa somehow advanced to the final, where he bravely ran with the leaders, miraculously covering the final 400 in 55 seconds. But he could not match Maree’s 52.
“The last decent 5,000 I ran,” Chapa said, “is when Maree smoked me.”
Chapa and Salazar decided to redshirt their senior track seasons at Oregon to focus on training for the 1980 Olympic Games. Despite his NCAA setback and the injury, Chapa was widely viewed as a medal contender in Moscow and a legitimate threat to Rono’s 3,000 and 5,000 world records.
It was a view that took even greater hold after Chapa’s performance at the Florida Relays that March. Chapa, Salazar and former Oregon teammates Matt Centrowitz and Don Clary spent part of that spring in Gainesville to train in the warm Florida weather. After a hard week of training, Chapa was part of an Oregon Track Club 4 x 1-mile relay, splitting 4:02.
“The 10k is the next event (in the meet),” Chapa said. “I thought, ‘I can get a better workout,’ so I jumped into the 10k.”
Chapa not only ran but won, clocking 28:50.6, beating a fresh Dick Buerkle, a 1976 Olympian at 5,000 and the former world record holder in the mile indoors, by more than two seconds despite having run a mile only minutes earlier.
Chapa won the 5,000 at the Oregon Twilight meet in May, but suffered an injury on the last lap that he said “torpedoed my career.”
“I heard a little snap,” he said. “Felt something in my foot, and after that it was super sore.
“It hurt a lot and there wasn’t a whole lot of time to get ready for the Trials, and then I started to develop tendonitis because I started running differently.”
Chapa made the Trials final but was unable to stay with the leaders and eventually dropped out. Centrowitz won, followed by Buerkle with McChesney, who had spent much of the spring injured, holding on for the third and final spot on the Olympic team after boldly charging into the lead in the race’s final mile. But because of Jimmy Carter’s ill-conceived Olympic boycott after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, McChesney, Centrowitz and Co. missed out on the Moscow Games.
McChesney, a year later, won the 5,000 at the storied Bislett Games in Oslo, beating Ethiopia’s Miruts Yifter, the Olympic 5,000 champion from the previous summer. But it wasn’t the Olympics. He made the U.S. team for the first-ever World Track and Field Championships in 1983, but eventually his career was derailed by a persistent Achilles injury, the result of a high school classmate jumping on the tendon during a P.E. class basketball game. McChesney died in a car accident on the Oregon Coast in 1992.
“It was the first time I had really failed,” Chapa said of the Olympic Trials. “It was just kind of running career up until that time, since I was 15 was all about getting better and also just meeting expectations.
“I remember dropping out of that race. I remember dropping out more than anything else because I couldn’t keep up and the whole idea of these were guys like Buerkle, I had just beaten. When I couldn’t keep up with those guys, I just thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ It was so discouraging. I remember looking through the fence (at Hayward Field), and I can still see the fence and watching those guys run that race and just how horrible I felt, not only because I dropped out, but also I felt I should have been in there.”
He continued to struggle with the injury in 1981, his senior year at Oregon. He then signed with Athletics West, the Nike-financed elite post-college team, but couldn’t run in 1982.
He was attending law school at Indiana when he said, “sort of a freak kind of thing happened.””I discovered if I elevated part of my foot, I could run without pain and my father made a plexiglass orthotic for me,” Chapa said. “As soon as we jumped on the track, I couldn’t do it. That’s when I started running road races.”
He finished fourth in the prestigious Peachtree 10k road race in Atlanta in July 1983.
“I didn’t know what to expect but I knew that I was feeling good for the first time in the spring of ’83 that I started to be able to run without any pain and I was in a rush to get in shape,” Chapa said. “Bloomington is very hilly and my workout routine for a couple of months was every day, I’m going to run, I’m going to run faster than I did the day before. Just all out. And as soon as I couldn’t do it, I would take a few days off and then start again. That was a very interesting year for me. Surprised me that I could finish in the top four.”
That fall, Chapa was seventh at the New York City Marathon, running 2:11:13, the second fastest ever marathon debut by an American after Salazar’s 2:09:41 debut at the 1980 New York race.
Suddenly Chapa had joined Salazar on a short list of contenders to make Team USA in the marathon for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Once again, foot problems ended his Olympic dream.
“I had a bone spur that pierced the plantar fascia, and I tried to work through it, and I couldn’t, so I finally had an operation to have the bone spur removed in March (1984),” Chapa said. “Then I just got in shape and was focused on running New York again.”
With the New York City race approaching, Chapa did one of Dellinger’s go to workouts, the 30th Avenue Drill, where runners do a 1,200 meters on the Hayward track to simulate the start of a race, then hit the roads for four miles over a long hill and then down to Lane Community College for another 1,200 on a track and then make the climb back to Hayward finishing with another 1,200 on the track.
“I remember running about 40 seconds faster than Alberto’s fastest, and so I knew I was ready to run,” Chapa said.
As a tune-up for New York, he decided to run against Olympic marathon gold medalist Carlos Lopes of Portugal in the Run Against Crime 15k in El Paso.
“And coming off the bridge and going into Mexico, some out-of-control guy with a wheelchair hit me, and I went flying, and I hurt my hamstring,” Chapa said. “And tried to run New York and I think I got through 15 miles and couldn’t continue.”
He ran one last race, the Tokyo Marathon in February 1985.
“And my last race I did this as much for money as anything,” Chapa said. “I always felt I could pull a rabbit out of a hat, and so I went to Tokyo to run a marathon and the same thing, I just couldn’t do it. I was married. First kid was born, and I just said you know what, it’s time to call it quits.”
Chapa joined Nike in 1992, rising to global vice president for sports marketing and later as vice president of Nike.com. He left the company in 2001 to found his own investment firm, Quixote Investment. He remained close to Dellinger until the coach’s death last June.
“Dellinger really loved Rudy,” Boileau said. “We all did.”
Chapa and Boileau were part of an Oregon team that edged UTEP for the 1977 NCAA cross country title and was simply the greatest collection of North American distance running talent in college history. Salazar, Centrowitz, McChesney and Clary made U.S. Olympic teams. Chapa set an American record. Boileau ran in two Olympic Games for Canada.
As the 30th anniversary of their title win approached in 2007, Chapa offered to take Dellinger, who suffered a stroke in 2000, and the team anywhere Dellinger wanted for a reunion.
“I would have been happy just going to the Oregon Coast and catching up with everybody, talking about the good old days. But Bill says ‘Vegas,’” Boileau said, laughing.
So the Ducks headed to Las Vegas, Chapa picking up the tab for the reunion.
At 68, Chapa is surprised and a little uneasy that he still owns the high school 10,000 record.
“I’m always a bit hesitant to talk about it because I feel a bit of a fraud because you can look at it and I hear people say, ‘Wow, it’s 50 years old. Well, it’s 50 years old because…,” he said. “So I would love it if somebody would break it.
“Early it surprised me you didn’t see more kids going for it, challenging it. As time has gone by, the last 20, 30 years it’s an event that kids don’t run now.”
Chapa is right. Today’s top runners don’t run the 10,000 as often as the stars of his era did. Instead the Chapas and Hulsts of the 21st Century prefer to focus on high profile national caliber meets sponsored by shoe companies.
“Kids don’t experiment with longer distances like the 10k like we did,” Serna said. “There’s too much at stake. The risk is too great with the 10k. Where even with the 5k you can recover quicker than the 10. Now the focus isn’t even the high school season. It’s these shoe meets after the state meets.”
But that only explains part of the “because…”
Starting in the early 80s, American men’s middle distance and distance running went through a 20-year slump at all levels from high schools to the Olympic Games and World Championships. High school coaches cut back on mileage and intensity in response to charges that runners were burning out in their teens. Track lost many of its potential stars to soccer as that sport became increasingly popular. Drastic NCAA scholarship reductions meant that coaches felt they didn’t have the luxury of spending a scholarship on a distance runner who might take a year or two to develop when a sprinter could compete in and impact multiple events each meet. There were fewer top-level competitive opportunities as sponsors fled the sport following a series of doping scandals.
The tide turned when Virginia prep Alan Webb broke Jim Ryun’s 36-year-old high school mile record (3:55.3), running 3:53.43 against an Olympic caliber field at the 2001 Prefontaine Classic and then the emergence of Rupp, three years later.
Just as Prefontaine, Ryun and Liquori inspired Chapa’s generation, the success of Rupp, Matthew Centrowitz, Cole Hocker and Grant Fisher at the Olympic and World Championship level has provided the role models that young American runners missed during the 20-year slump. In the last three Olympic Games, the U.S. men have more gold medals in the 1,500 (two), one of the Games’ two signature events, than the American men have medals in the other, the 100 (one).
Lighter spikes with carbon fiber plates and training shoes that allow runners to train longer and harder have made a huge impact in recent years. Of the 50 performers in the all-time high school Top 10 lists in five events — the 1,500, mile, 3,000, two-mile and 5,000 — all but 12 ran this decade, and only five ran in the 20th Century. Between 1967 and Webb’s 2001 breakthrough, no American high school runner broke 4:00 in the mile. Twenty-three prep milers have gone sub-4 this decade. Seven runners broke 4:00 in 2025 alone, two of them coming from Loftus’ Crater program. Yet of the Top 10 10,000 high school times in history, six of them were run in the 1970s and a seventh is Lindgren’s 1964 victory against the Soviets.
The biggest factor fueling the high school record onslaught isn’t the shoes, Loftus said.
“I think it’s social media,” he said. “They’re on it all the time, they see kids running this fast. When you have Newbury Park or the Utah schools, or you go back and look at Rupp, who kind of started that too, they see it. Three-thirty-six in the 1,500? They see that’s possible. They start to realize this is something they can do.”
“I would bet if there was a concerted effort by a lot of these kids that are competing now that come from really good programs and say we’re going to take this record down, it would go down,” Chapa said.
But there have been concerted efforts in the past. Rupp, as he was throughout his career, was coached by Salazar at Central Catholic and had the logistical and training support of Nike. Having shattered Lindgren’s 5,000 record, he took aim at the 10,000 standard in a pro meet in Belgium. His time of 29:09.56 was the fastest by a U.S. prep in 29 years but still well behind Chapa’s record.
The most recent targeted attempt at the Chapa mark was in 2023 at the Portland Track Classic by Crater’s Tyrone Gorze, who earlier in the year set the national high school indoor 5,000 standard. As a Crater junior, Gorze in 2022 ran 29:29.92 in a rainstorm at the Portland meet.
Chapa was invited to 2003 race, but had a commitment out of state. Instead, he offered Gorze his best wishes and the purple and white Hammond High singlet he wore at the Drake Relays.
“At first I was like, I don’t want to wear it. This is Rudy Chapa’s,” Gorze told DyeStat editor Doug Binder. “But then I was like, ‘I’ve got to wear it. It’s a 10K. It’s for fun, going after his record.’”
With the track’s wave lights set at 28:30 pace, Gorze took off after Chapa’s record, staying on schedule through 5,000 before struggling through an 82-second lap with a coughing fit.
He recovered, finishing in 29:00.17. It was the closest anyone had come to Chapa in 48 years, but was still nearly 30 seconds off the mark.
“It goes to show how great Rudy Chapa was,” Gorze said. “That record’s going to stay around for a long time. Some kid might come up and take it some day, but I tried for it tonight and it was tough.”
Toughness is a recurring subject when Chapa now looks back on his career.
“I’ll be honest with you, the only thing that I wish, I’ve looked back on and thought about was I never got to Europe and compete when I was ready to run,” he said. “The one year I did go, and that was in ’79, and that was after the ankle incident, and I was done.
“I never found out if I was a really tough competitor. Because so many of my races from high school straight through to that point, I either won fairly easy or I won. I always wondered, because I remember very well times that I got into competitive races and there’s a different feeling when there’s a number of people there and your whole life has just been about separating yourself. One regret I never went there to find out if I could be a really tough competitor. So yeah, that’s always going to exist out there for me. It’s one thing to train to be tough, it’s another to compete. And so that’s one regret.
“It’s a good quality to have, but probably one of my worst qualities is always going to be wanting to compete, and I think it’s one reason why I trained so hard in high school because as soon as you did something it was, ‘Alright what’s next? And that was really great in terms of individual challenges. There’s lot of guys up there and they’re all really, really good and, ‘Can you be tougher than them?’ And it was just there, and it was a personal thing. If I look back, that’s something I wish I would have pressed it more.
“When it’s part of who you are, you don’t really think of it. You go.”
And so he looks through a past so much of which remains a blur, wrestling with a question that Serna and anyone else who was in Knoxville that night in 1975 or at Drake that wet afternoon, that Hulst and McChesney, Rono and Salazar, Gorze, Candiano and Dellinger already knew the answer to.
That a record, 50 years old and counting, proves.
He was as tough as anyone.
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