Erison Hurtault, the Columbia graduate who runs for his native Dominica, continued a solid 2010 campaign, running 46.02 for second place at an invitational meet Sunday evening in Lignano, Italy.
Hurtault has a season’s best of 45.81. His lifetime best of 45.40 dates back to his senior season at Columbia, 2007, when he placed third in the NCAA championships. Hurtault represented Dominica in last year’s World Championships and in the 2008 Olympic Games.
In the women’s 800, American Alysia Johnson won Section II in 1:57.85, a lifetime best, with three other American women close behind also breaking 2:00, two of them for the first time. The others were Maggie Vessey, 1:59.00; Morgan Uceny, 1:59.29, and Molly Beckwith, 1:59.83.
It was the first time under two minutes for Uceny, the Cornell graduate, and Beckwith, a senior this spring at Indiana. Uceny thus becomes the third Ivy League graduate to break 2:00, joining Meredith Rainey of Harvard (1:57.04 in 1996) and Anna Pierce of Brown (1:58.80 as Anna Willard in 2009).
Pierce was fifth in Sunday’s race, in 2:00.79. New Jersey’s Erin Donohue was first in Section I, in 2:01.26, followed by two other Americans, Heather Dorniden (2:01.78) and Geena Gall (2:03.31).
In the women’s 200, New Yorker Shana Cox was fifth in 23.76. /JP/