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Nicole Cochran stood by herself in the middle of the Edgar Brown Stadium infield, cheering as loud as she could.
One by one, the runners the Bellarmine senior had just vanquished in Friday's 4A girls 3,200-meter race climbed the Star Track XXVI awards podium and received their medals.
Cochran, though, wasn't part of the official ceremony.
She had been disqualified from the race, ruled to have run on the inside line of the track along the far curve during the seventh lap -- the precise moment when she made her move to escape a pack of runners and take the lead.
"There's not really much I can do," said the Harvard-bound Cochran, who was hoping to repeat her 2007 title. "We tried to appeal it. It's very unfortunate, but sometimes it's what you get dealt."
As she finished speaking, Shadle Park sophomore Andrea Nelson walked over. Nelson had been awarded the victory after Cochran's disqualification, but she took the first-place medal and slipped it around Cochran's neck.
"It's your medal," Nelson said to her. "You're the state champion."
Then, one by one, the rest of the top eight runners gathered around Cochran in a circle and held their own informal ceremony, exchanging their medals -- Nelson receiving the second-place medal, Redmond's Sarah Lord the third-place medal, and so on down the line.
"That's not how you win state," Nelson said. "She totally deserves it. She crushed everybody."
It was a controversial end to Day 1 of the two-day state track and field championships, a day that otherwise saw plenty of tight finishes.
Shadle Park leads the girls standings with 20 points, with defending champion Gig Harbor second with 17. Bellarmine, though, still got eight runners and two relays through to today's finals and are in good shape to win their first title since 2005.
Mead leads what figures to be a wide-open boys race after Day 1 with 15.5 points.
Girls
Ferris senior Kelly McNamee didn't have the finish she quite hoped for in the high jump.
While she successfully defended her state title, she only cleared 5-8, doing so on her third try to beat out Mountain View's Christine Rice on fewer misses.
McNamee had hopes of becoming only the fourth girl in state history to go over 6 feet. She said having to run a hurdles prelim in the middle of the competition might have played a factor, but she didn't want to make excuses.
"Honestly, I don't know what happened," she said. "I know what I can do, and it just wasn't there today."
McNamee then went and finished sixth in the long jump, which was won by Curtis junior Andrea Geubelle with a best of 19-13/4.
Geubelle was consistent throughout the competition, posting four jumps over 19 feet and the five best of the afternoon, but she still was hoping for better results.
"I'm glad I got first, so I'm not going to say I was disappointed," she said. "But I felt I could have popped a 20-footer. That was my goal."
Thomas Jefferson senior Sofia Malamura won the shot put with a throw of 41-2 1/2 -- a personal-best by more than 7 inches and a school record, but more important, almost 31/2 feet farther than freshman teammate Kayla Adams, who'd beaten Malamura at last week's West Central District meet but placed seventh Friday.
"In practice, we don't acknowledge it, but in competition we're head-to-head like this," Malamura said, knocking her fists together. "I just didn't want her to beat me today."
Monroe senior Kelsey Brennan won a tightly-bunched javelin competition, going 135-9 on her first throw in the finals to pass Marysville-Pilchuck's Jenna Walsh.
"We all knew it would be close. There was a handful of us who could easily have taken it," said Brennan, who finished second a year ago. "I usually throw better here than anywhere else. I think it's the atmosphere here."
Boys
In a long jump competition that saw three of the top four qualifiers fail to make the finals, Kentlake junior Zach Smith came up big in the finals to win the title.
He took the lead with his first jump, going 22-8 to pass Oak Harbor's Donovan Hunt. Then on his final jump, Smith popped a 23-3 that stood up as the winner.
"I knew I'd gotten myself into first, but there were a couple others behind me who looked like they were ready to jump big, so I knew I had to go farther," Smith said. "It was either go big or go home."
Inglemoor senior Ian Quinn definitely went big to win the pole vault title, going 15 inches higher than he'd ever vaulted when he cleared 15-3 on his first attempt to finally get the best of his three-way duel with Stanwood's Nathan Simunds and Mead's Keith Webber.
"That made it fun," Quinn said. "We're very aware of what's going on. Last week, I won on misses. There was a lot of going back and forth today."
Bethel senior Oliver Henry led the discus competition from his first attempt, going 169-3 and watching it stand up for the title.
"I felt relieved," he said. "I got fifth last year, and I was just trying to prove to my dad that I could do it."
Gig Harbor senior Miles Unterreiner, headed to Stanford in the fall, will take the 3,200 title with him after dominating the second half of the race to win in 9:13.51 -- more than 5 seconds ahead of Tahoma's Jon Lafler.
"I was planning on coattailing the first mile, then throw it in gear at the mile mark and see who went with me," he said. "I just kept ratcheting it up lap by lap."
