The tone of the 104th Millrose Games was established early Friday night at Madison Square Garden, when the Velveteen Playboys, a shimmying, sharply dressed rock band, took the stage — or, in this case, the track — to jam their way through a multi-song set.After more than a century, the Millrose Games maintain their position as a singular event in track and field.
There are the tight quarters and manic activity, suggesting a three-ring circus; the officials circling the track in tuxedos add to the effect. There are the widely disparate events — representing, in a sense, the highbrow and lowbrow of track and field — clattering along the curved wooden track of the Garden, a techno beat thumping all the while in the background.
Chief among them in recent years has been Bernard Lagat, who has won the Wanamaker Mile, the meet’s marquee event, a record eight times.
But he failed Friday to capture his ninth, losing to Deresse Mekonnen, a 23-year-old Ethiopian and the current world indoor champion, who finished in 3 minutes 58.58 seconds.
Lagat led for the first seven laps of the 11-lap race before Mekonnen overtook him. Lagat made three furious passing attempts in the last two laps — his gold chain swaying against his purple top — but fell short, finishing in 3:59.01.
“The straightaways are just that small,” Lagat said, holding his index fingers in front of his face. “He held his position.”
The race served as a tense, scintillating coda to an otherwise whimsical night.
Ashton Eaton won the Millrose Multi Challenge, a quirky event created this year to bring together three of America’s best decathletes. His scores for the three challenges — the shot-put, 60-meter hurdles and high jump — were enough to beat Trey Hardee, the gold medalist at the 2009 world championships, and Bryan Clay, the gold medalist at the Beijing Olympics.
“There was a lot of nervousness in this young man, because the competition that I faced,” Eaton said. “But there’s a lot of fight in this young man.”
The women’s 60-meter hurdles featured Queen Harrison, 22, a native of Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., who was named the top female collegiate track and field athlete in the country last year and has generated much buzz this season.
But Harrison struggled off the blocks, and it was Vonette Dixon, 35, a veteran hurdler from Jamaica, who prevailed with a time of 8 seconds. Harrison finished in 8.19 seconds for fourth place.
“My speed is not quite there, because I’ve been working on my strength,” Harrison said.
That these games were a dry run of sorts for the outdoor season — including the world championships this August in Daegu, South Korea — was a recurring theme among the athletes Friday night.
“My focus now is the world championships,” Harrison said. “The longer goal is the Olympic Games.”
The meet’s most idiosyncratic event involved professional athletes from five different sports — football, baseball, basketball, soccer and bobsledding — gathering on the track to settle the type of debate that tends to exist only in the realm of hypotheticals conceived and debated by sports fans after a couple of rounds of beer.
The winner of the 60-meter race was a football player, Jacoby Jones, a 26-year-old wide receiver who just completed his fourth season with the Houston Texans. He won comfortably in 7 seconds, and ran the last 30 meters of the race with his index finger stretched far above his head. “We were all talking trash before the race,” Jones said. “We were just having fun.”
The organizers could not resist giving even the more straightforward events a twist. The men’s and women’s 60-meter dashes involved sprinters exclusively from the United States and Jamaica, and the races were cast as a competition between the two countries.
Veronica Campbell-Brown of Jamaica, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 200-meter race and reigning world champion in the indoor 60-meter, finished the women’s race in 7.11 seconds to beat the American Lauryn Williams, who finished in 7.22 seconds.
Nesta Carter, also from Jamaica, won the men’s competition with a time of 6.52 seconds, edging Mike Rogers, an American, who finished 0.04 of a second behind.
“When it comes to sprinting, it’s between Jamaica and the U.S.,” Campbell-Brown said after the race. “And over the last few years, Jamaica has been doing very well.”
Nevertheless, the United States was ultimately declared the winner, as the total number of points among the 12 runners was used to decide the contest.
But, in the spirit of the night, the Jamaican sprinters hardly seemed to mind.
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