Washington State’s Lee Walburn placed seventh in the men’s decathlon at the 2024 NCAA Outdoor track and field championships Thursday, with 7,816 points to set a personal best in what became a theme for the two-day event at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon.
Walburn, a Whitefish grad, won two NAIA decathlon championships at Carroll College before transferring two years ago to the Cougars.
He started the 2024 NCAA competition with a personal-best time in the 100 meters of 10.85 seconds, threw a shot put 49-1.5 on his final throw in the third event and concluded the first day with his third PR with 48.4 in the 400 to sit in 11th place after five events.
Walburn started the second day in the same vein by running a personal-best 14.89 in the 110 hurdles and continued working his way up the standings by clearing a season-best 15-5.5 in the pole vault.
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After nine events, Walburn had moved up five places going into the final 1,500 meters, where he ran another season best in 4:38.42 to clinch seventh overall and first-team All-America honors.
Texas’ Leo Neugebauer won the decathlon with a collegiate-record 8,961 points and surpassed the rest of the field by over 800 points.
Walburn placed fifth at the 2023 Pac-12 championships in his previous best postseason finish for the Cougars.
In the only other full decathlon Walburn completed during the 2024 season, he scored 7,694 points back in March at the Texas Relays, where he also achieved the minimum qualifying mark for the U.S. Olympic Trials. That mark ranked him 11th in the country before, but his NCAA finish moved him up to eighth in the U.S. with the top 18 slated to make the field in Eugene just two weeks later.
From Gazette staff and news services