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UO track star Simeon Birnbaum won his first title at Oregon’s home cross-country meet, while Diana Cherotich defended her win in last year’s race. UO’s men’s and women’s cross country teams cruised to victories.
SPRINGFIELD — Simeon Birnbaum has bigger goals than winning the Bill Dellinger Invitational.
The senior track star, who moonlights in the fall with the Oregon men’s cross-country team, has the cross-country postseason approaching — and in the spring he’ll transition back to the track, where he claimed the NCAA 1,500-meter title in June.
The Dellinger, in a way, is supposed to be a warm-up — Oregon’s one and only home meet before the Big Ten championships later this month in Wisconsin.
Granted, Birnbaum didn’t seem to get the memo.
A year after finishing 18th at the meet, Birnbaum returned to Pine Ridge Golf Club in Springfield Friday for the 20th annual Bill Dellinger Invitational and won the men’s 8,000-meter race in 23 minutes, 5.5 seconds, beating teammate — and second-place finisher — Connor Burns by 27 seconds.
The one-two finish helped key a dominant team victory for the Oregon men, while the Ducks’ women’s program dominated its own field thanks to a one-two finish from Diana Cherotich (19:31.4) and Juliet Cherubet (19:42.3) in the 6,000 meters.
For Birnbaum, Friday’s win was just one of many boxes he wanted to check during his final year in Eugene.
“I never really had a great race here,” Birnbaum said. “My last two times were pretty bad. This year, I knew it was going to be a little bit different.”
Birnbaum said he’s been training more like a traditional cross country runner and has addressed an iron-deficiency issue that plagued him throughout last season.
“I feel very strong aerobically, had a really good camp in Park City and just came in today ready to run really hard. I wanted to hurt today,” he said. “I wanted to get a good effort in. I feel like I accomplished that.”
It was evident that Birnbaum was feeling close to his best when he began to separate himself from Burns after the 5K mark.
“I came in today thinking, ‘Oh, I got to try and break him,’ And he’s also thinking ‘Oh, I got to try and break Connor,’” Burns said. “And he won today.”
It was Birnbaum’s first Dellinger title.
It was not the first for Cherotich, a sophomore who defended her 2025 title without breaking much of a sweat.
“I thought Diana looked fantastic coming down the home stretch,” Oregon women’s coach Shalane Flanagan said. “Like a whole (different) level of another gear that I haven’t necessarily seen from her.”
That may have been the case, but Cherotich said afterward that it wasn’t really that hard.
“I feel like I’m good because we didn’t run crazy,” Cherotich said. “We was just chilling until 4K. Then we tried to push it. So I feel like my body is not tired.”
And now, the Ducks will return to training. The Big Ten championships aren’t until Oct. 30, and while Friday saw stellar individual efforts from the two winners, the Ducks know the postseason brings team competition to the forefront.
“It can feel like an individual sport at times, but when you get to the 8K in the national meet, you realize that if it was just me out here, I would give up,” Birnbaum said. “But then you think about the boys you’ve been training with all year, the amount of times you guys have pushed each other, and you don’t want to let each other down.”
