Consider this.
Winning an individual state championship is very hard. Winning two in the same meet is memorable. Winning three over the course of a weekend is downright exceptional.
Winning four?
That's where legends are born.
This weekend, it happened twice.
In Iowa, Southeast Polk (IA) senior Sydney Milani, a sprinter who's bound for Iowa State in the fall and whom had never won an individual title, captured four championships in the 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m. Not to be outdone, Provo (UT) junior Meghan Hunter accomplished the very same feat.
And yet, those individual outbursts don't always guarantee you a team title. Milani's Class 4A program finished third with 70 points. Provo finished fourth overall in Class 5A with 53 points.
But Milani's wins were also more than just gutsy finishes. She finished with all-time Iowa best times in the 100m, 200m and 400m. She ran 11.49 (+2.6) seconds in the 100m dash (all conditions), surpassing the state's former mark held by Olympian Natasha Keiser-Brown.
"That just blew my mind," Milani told the Des Moines Register.
And she went 23.68 (+2.1) in the 200m and 52.90 in the 400m -- that one was good for US No. 6. Her winning 800m time was under 2:10.38 -- an exceptional performance from a sprinter on tired legs.
Hunter managed what no other girl in Utah had ever done before.
Four up, four down. And she's just a junior.
She closed out the 100m in 12.20 (+0.7), dominated the 200m in 24.42 (-0.7) and went a superb 53.14 in the 400m -- Hunter already owns the nation's third fastest time at 52.59.
She closed with a remarkable US No. 5 effort of 2:09.26 in the 800m. That was faster than her older sister Kate's best mark in high school -- and Kate is currently a freshman at BYU.
When asked afterward how all of it felt, she calmly told the Provo Daily Herald, "I was taking it one race at a time."
Catch up all the coverage of Milani's and Hunter's historical performances.
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