‘That’s our teammate!’ Fellow Lakers, fans at Hayward Field left in awe of Lake Oswego sophomore sensation Mia Brahe-Pedersen at OSAA track championships
By René Ferrán | Photos by Taylor Balkom
Mia Brahe-Pedersen’s performance in the Class 6A girls 100-meter final Saturday won’t be remembered as a record.
Instead, it’ll go down as one of the greatest runs in the history of the OSAA state track and field championships.
The Lake Oswego sophomore won the title in an awe-inspiring 11.09 seconds that came with a 3.2-meter-per-second tailwind that rendered it ineligible to be a state record.
However, it tied for the fourth-fastest time in U.S. history for a high school girl under any conditions, and as the Hayward Field crowd gasped, then let out a full-throated scream, Brahe-Pedersen watched the time post on the huge video board at the north end and thought, Is that a 0 or a 2?
“It was complete shock,” she said. “I’ve never felt that exact emotion before. Someone needs to come up with a name for it.”
Brahe-Pedersen looked at her rival and good friend Lily Jones, a Roosevelt senior whom she credits for pushing her to the heights she’s hit this season, and kept asking, Did that really just happen?
“And yeah, it really did,” Brahe-Pedersen said. “It hasn’t even set in yet. It feels like everything is just lining up in place.”
Brahe-Pedersen, who earlier anchored the 4x100 relay to victory, returned later in the afternoon for the 200 final. Despite feeling “almost tired, which is a little bit weird for me, but also, oddly enough, calm,” she broke the meet record she set in Friday’s prelims, running a 23.25 that was two-hundredths of a second off her personal best.
“To see our teammate continue to push the narrative is a major morale booster,” said sophomore Josie Donelson, who finished fourth in the 200 after winning the 400. “To see her do so amazing — when you see that, you’re like, that’s our teammate. And we’re also killing it. It just helps everyone all around.”
“I feel like the 200 was the one people expected me more to win,” Brahe-Pedersen said. “So, I’m more pleased with my 100 performance because my time was super unexpected. My 200 was right where I wanted it to be.”
Brahe-Pedersen typically trails Jones for the first half of each 100 race they run, including at the Jesuit Twilight Relays, when she needed a burst over the final 10 to edge Jones by one-hundredth of a second.
But Saturday, when she was side-by-side with Jones almost from the start, “I knew from then on, something special was about to happen,” she said.
“I was hoping it would be wind-legal, but either way, a time’s a time. It happened, and now I know the potential that Lily and I and Sophia (Beckmon of Oregon City, who took third) have going forward.
“It just means there’s so much more to come.”
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