Track powers Ivy team in UK

With United States Track and Field struggling to find sponsorship for stateside meets, the prize-laden European track circuit is home to the best U.S. track and field athletes. The Europeans may have fan support and sponsorship on their side, but unfortunately for them, the summer meets showed that their continent's collegiate talent is still not on par with their American counterparts. Penn got its own taste of European track over the summer during a two-week trip in June with fellow Ivy League tracksters from Cornell. Penn and Cornell joined forces to go undefeated in four meets in Europe from June 15 through July 1. The first stop on the tour was Dublin, where Penn and Cornell faced Irish club teams. "We annihilated the Irish teams," Penn women's track coach Betty Costanza said. Costanza's annihilation, however, did not stop when the Americans crossed the Irish Sea. The Quakers and Big Red competed in three more meets and dominated the competition in each of them. When not competing, the team was usually traveling to its next competition, so there was little time for lounging around. The traveling time also cut into practice sessions -- just three were held over the entire trip. By the time the team arrived at its third meet on the island of Guernsey, near France, Costanza said most of the athletes were tired due to all the traveling. But even in a sleep-deprived state, Penn totally dominated the competition in the all-comers meet in Guernsey. At this particular meet, records were broken one after another. When the damage was done, 16 meet records had come crashing down -- all by American athletes. It was the Penn athletes, however, who were the most dominating performers. "The strength of the Penn/Cornell team was the Penn men and women," Costanza said. This superiority became even more apparent in the final meet of the tour, the face-off against Oxford/Cambridge. On the women's side, the Penn/Cornell 4x100 meter relay team not only blew away the Oxford/Cambridge squad, but it also blew away the meet record. The four runners on the squad -- Renata Clay, Jen Roy, Richelle Clements and Shana McDonald-Black -- were all Quakers. When all the points were tallied, the Penn/Cornell women's team had beaten Oxford/Cambridge by a score of 111-68. By finishing the tour with a 4-0 record, the tandem of Penn and Cornell remains the only combined Ivy League team to go undefeated in the meets in the 103 year history of the athlete exchange program. In past seasons, Harvard/Yale and Dartmouth/Brown fell to Oxford/Cambridge.

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