A return to windy, cold Laramie

The embargo is over.

For 41 years, the Western Athletic Conference and its offspring, the Mountain West Conference, managed to avoid scheduling conference outdoor track and field championships in Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming.

The reason? The Disaster of 1968.

This week, the MWC, in a leap of faith and fairness, ended that ban. This week, we have men and women bounding, jumping, sprinting and throwing in Laramie, a perch on the lofty plains of the Rockies that can experience weather as precarious as Nancy Pelosi's memory.

Back in 1968, the WAC picked Laramie to host the championship. That week in May it snowed. There are reports folks had to use blowtorches to dry the track and axes to chip the ice out of the steeplechase water pit. With stiff arctic winds, javelins were said to return to their senders or go thud in a white-blanketed ground.

When it ended, WAC coaches and athletic directors vowed they'd never hold the championship in Laramie again. Even University of Wyoming officials agreed to this pledge, I'm told.

It was a consensus. Hell would sell Hawaiian Shaved Ice before this meet would return to 7,200 feet.

This week, I tried to track down elements of the ban and find witnesses of the weather in Laramie that week.

Two BYU long jumpers who participated in Laramie 41 years ago told me the weather was something to behold, something they'd never encountered in a championship.

Bountiful's John Robinson, a retired Deseret News sports editor, called it "brutal." He remembers sprinters never taking off their sweatsuits and jumpers running to the bus in between leaps, just to keep warm. Robinson said the javelin throws would land in the snow.

"Yeah, a coach would signal a thumbs up when it was our turn and we'd run out of the bus to perform, then run back," said Jim Blaisdell, now the women's track coach at Weber State. He was Robinson's teammate and part of a jump contingent that included Alhi Alarotu and triple jumper Pertii Pousi.

"It was miserably cold. I remember they did use blow torches to dry the track. It was cold and windy and it had just snowed that week," said Blaisdell, who also ran the 400 meters against ASU Olympian Ron Freeman in that meet.

"To show you how windy and cold it was, I ran a 50-something and Freeman, who had run 44 seconds, ran something like a 49. There was snow on the ground around the track. The wind came up. It was a major wind."

Current WAC commissioner Karl Benson can't find a written policy for the ban in Laramie. "It isn't in the books," he told me this week.

Laramie did cause a WAC policy, however, that all visiting sports teams have to be on site 24 hours prior to competition.