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Sunday, August 26, 2001

By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

Seven members of the Pittsburgh Pharaoh Hounds finished their races last weekend at the U.S. half-marathon championships in Parkersburg, W.Va., looked at the results of the team competition and couldn't believe their eyes.

They tied for the title?

Fourteen runners, seven from each team, ran 13.1 miles each, and when the five fastest times from each team were added together to determine the team champion, both teams clocked in at 6 hours, 7 minutes, 1 second? After all those miles?

Impossible, they thought. Joked Ryan Erdley, "Buy your Powerball tickets now."

The numbers didn't lie. But they were close enough -- and the tiebreaking procedure was convoluted enough -- that it took four days to determine whether the Pharaoh Hounds or the CAA-Team A from Cincinnati had won the title.

The title went to the runners from Cincinnati -- by 0.095 second.

At the awards ceremony, the Cincinnati team was announced as the winner, but Dan Holland, the Hounds president, thought his team should have won. According to the USATF tiebreaker rules he found, the winning team is the one whose fifth-place finisher (and final scorer) finishes higher. Erdley finished 70th overall for the Pharaoh Hounds; the Cincinnati team's No. 5 man finished 76th.

Two days after the race, Holland filed a protest which worked its way through the levels of the USATF hierarchy. "I wasn't sure what we should do," he said. "Send e-mail, drop it, call them, fight harder."

Determining the winner turned into a mathematical nightmare. The officials didn't use what Holland thought was the tiebreaking procedure. The winner was different depending on how the times -- which were calculated to the 100th of a second -- were rounded. The discussion involved whether the individual times should be added up, then rounded ... or rounded off, then added.

Holland didn't think the officials were exactly sure what to do. "That was the problem. They had never had this happen."

But the Hounds were pleased with their performance, particularly because two of their members were feeling ill and the Cincinnati team, unlike their own, is regional team well-funded by USA Track and Field. The Pharaoh Hounds have two sponsors, Dick's Sporting Goods and Sabio Water, but they are a far cry from the well-funded local running teams that abounded in the area in the mid-1980s.

Joe Mahoney, a former medical resident at Pitt who has moved to Wisconsin, was the top-finishing Pharoah Hound in 1 hours, 9 minutes, 38.66 seconds, good for 34th place. He was followed by Eric Shafer (1:13:17.73, 52nd place), Hans Rottman (1:13:58.55, 58th place); Dave Hackworth (1:14:04.93, 59th place) and Erdley (1:15:59.26, 70th place).

"That's why we're Hounds," another team member, Paul Friedrich, said, laughing. "We run in a pack."