MileSplit HQ - The time that everyone was waiting for since the end of last year's New York XC season has finally arrived, as by pure coincidence the results of the Tour de NY-XC were being published just as that other event over in France with wheels was wrapping up. There were a lot of photo finishes for NY XC officials to scrutinize over and over and over again, Bill Meylan cranked out the data for the speed ratings to make sure everything fit right on Tully Runners, and we finally got a picture of what really happened last year. And overall, the delay in getting the TdNY-XC results was actually not that much longer than it took to decide the boys pole vault championship at the States meet.
On that note, there are probably still a few coaches who oddly think that the NY XC season is all about winning a team title at States, Feds, or Nationals, but the runners all know that the main reason why they are running is to don the yellow, green, white or some weird polka dot jersey after winning the Tour de NY-XC title in their specialty. Sure, in some alternate universe called the Real World there are teams like Fayetteville-Manlius, Liverpool, and Saratoga battling for an NXN title, but if you ask most NY runners in this article why they are running, they may somewhat likely possibly tell you that they are giving their all for a place among the 25 runners lined up on the Tour de NY-XC podium and to capture one of the Best Runner titles..
Though it's probably not necessary to clarify except for newbie fans, the Tour de NY-XC was established a while back to focus on the great efforts of the NY XC runners at five different venues during the year. The big 5 are the McQuaid stage, the Manhattan stage, the States (NYPHSAA-CHSAA-PSAL-AIS) stage, the Federation stage, and the NXN-NY+Footlockers-NE stage. To qualify for a Tour de NY-XC title, runners need to have competed in three of the stages from which their results are tallied up, and they can compete in four or all five and just drop out their least impressive results, as only the top three are counted. But in racing it's the more the merrier, because even though the General Classification (GC) speed ratings contest is determined from just those three best races, the Race Points Total (RPT) is tallied from all the races, and five chances are better than three.
Only the Federation stage involves runners who are all in the same race. The McQuaid and Manhattan stages include many races at the event; the States stage includes the results of the NYSPHSAA, CHSAA, PSAL, and AIS championships; and the NXN-NY+FL-NE stage includes the championship, open, and other races at the two meets. In all cases, everything is set on the top TR mark in a stage, which can come in any of the races, which in 2015 for McQuaid stage guys came in the AA race rather than the AAA.
The Tour de NY-XC main contest is the GC's tally that adds up the TR speed ratings difference of each runner behind the stage winner, who of course gets a nice goose egg for that race in the battle for the lowest total TRs deficit overall. Did you blow out a shoe at McQuaid or were you thinking too much about the beginning of winter track during the NXN-NY? No huge problem if your coach signed you up for four or five of the TdNY-XC stages so that you could toss out the stinker. But if you didn't show up at either McQuaid or Manhattan, you needed to nail the last three stages (yep, that's you Aidan and Kelsey of Blue Streaks fame).
The TdNY-XC's RPT contest adds up all the points the runners got from finishing in the top 10 places in a stage, allotted on a 20-15-12-10-8-6-4-3-2-1 basis, and unlike the GC, the runner gets to chalk up points from all five stages if they were an all-you-can-eat-up runner like Noah and Sam Affolder or Jessica Lawson and most of the runners from teams like Xavier, Ithaca, Elmira, Corning, Carthage, Monroe-Woodbury, Syosset, and East Syracuse-Minoa.
In addition, there are awards for the top Young Runners (7th and 8th grade for girls, 9th and 10th grade for boys), the Mountain classification (top result involving Mt. Doom at Bowdoin), and Sprint Points Classification (best 800m performance in following outdoor track season, since for distance runners the half-mile is about as close as you get to a sprint and the TdNY-XC extends a nod to other seasons just as some bike Tours cross national borders).
5 Tour de NY-XC Podiums
Top 25 results for the General Classification and Race Point classifications plus a bunch of other titles.
The Results
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1: Boys GC Podium
2: Girls GC Podium
3: Boys RPT Podium
4: Girls RPT Podium
5: All Titles Wrap-up