In the sprinting class, and yet in a class by them selves, are those runners who have the peculiar ability of attaining extraordinary speed for all the short distances up to fifty or seventy-five yards, but who have never run with equal success in the regulation longer sprinting distances. A number of men divide the records for these, so to speak, " trick " distances, but the most typical and con sistent performer was, perhaps, Edward B. Bloss of Harvard, '94. Bloss was essentially a short distance sprinter. In his day he held the records for all the short distances up to seventy-five yards, and they were as follows : fifteen yards in 21 sec onds ; twenty yards in 2 seconds ; thirty yards in seconds ; forty yards in 43 seconds ; fifty yards in seconds ; and seventy-five yards in 7# seconds.
These were absolutely authentic records, a thing which cannot be said positively of the perform ances of some of the quick starters who have sub sequently claimed to have shaved one-fifth of a second of Bloss's time. When Bloss first began to run he used the standing start, but he later adopted the surer and faster crouching one, and his style had the individuality of planting the rear foot unusually far back. From this brace he would leap away as though shot out of a gun, and the way he would swarm away from the line for thirty or forty yards seemed to the men beside him as almost magical. Bloss, as might be expected, was a small, stocky runner with plenty of compact muscle. Duffey and Wefers both share with other less notable sprinters records in the short distances, and somewhat over a dozen sprinters are credited with 4i seconds for forty yards. Even " Lon " Meyers, who was not essentially a runner of the " trick " distances, is credited, not without some slight doubt of authen ticity, with a record of 52 seconds for fifty yards. It is very rare that the men who are particularly good at these short distances succeed in running the whole hundred yards. A. H. Green of Har vard, '92, who, for example, was the fastest man at the very short distances at Cambridge in his day, never did as well on cinders as he did on boards, and the best he could do for the whole hundred yards was seconds. In fact, a peculiar sort of combination of nervous energy and running " action " seems to be required for these distances, and clever performances at them are due more to the spring that a jumper uses than to the steady stride of the sprinter.
Of the two preeminent sprinters of the present generation the performances of Wefers have been somewhat lost sight of, followed so soon and eclipsed as they were by the record-breaking running of Arthur Duffey. And yet not even Duffey was as fast as Wefers in the longer sprint and for all-round consistent work at the short dis tances, and leaving out Duffey's record-breaking hundred, it is not altogether easy to give com plete preeminence to the younger son of George town. Wefers was a man of large physique, as strong above the waist as below it, and in athletic costume he might quite as reasonably have been taken for a hammer-thrower as a sprinter. Had he trained for the middle distances instead of the dashes, there seems little reason to believe that he might not have distinguished himself at the quarter and half mile. At the former distance he performed more than creditably on many occa sions, and his whole style of running was based not so much on the explosive swirl of the quick starter as on solid strength and stability and length of stride. He was not a phenomenally fast starter, and it was in the last rather than in the first thirty yards that he generally won his races. Wefers broke the intercollegiate record in the hundred yards and smashed all records, amateur and professional, in the two-twenty in 1896, when, on the same day, he ran the hundred in 95 seconds and the longer sprint in 21I-- seconds. This performance definitely stamped him as the preeminent sprinter of his day, in spite of the fact that the Westerners, Crum, Maybury, and Rush, all had been credited with a hundred in less than even time. Wefers's time in the hundred, taken as it was by the intercollegiate timers, was abso lutely authentic, and his extraordinary race in the longer sprint was a triumphant corroboration of his ability, if anything of the sort were needed. Wefers won his record-breaking hundred that day by an easy seven feet from H. C. Patterson of Williams, while J. S. Brown of Cornell was third by half a yard. In the two-twenty Wefers finished a whole second ahead of Patterson, and his speed in the last forty yards, when he simply lost the other three runners, was probably the fastest running ever done in this country up to that time. Patterson finished in 22i seconds, Denholm of Harvard was two feet behind Patter son, and Brown of Cornell was only a few inches behind Denholm.