Brown hits ‘Superman’ dive to win state title

Brown leaps over the finish line, clinching the 400-meter hurdles AAA state title by .02 seconds. ‘If that’s what it takes, that’s what I’m going to do,’ Brown told himself before the run.

Blue Ridge track standout Hayden Brown warned his coaches before he ran in the Class AAA State Championship 400-meter hurdles.

“I told them that if the race was really close at the end and it came down to it, I was going to dive,” Brown said. “I just didn’t know it was going to be as close as it was.”

As Brown rounded the corner and attempted to clear the last few hurdles in the race, he messed up his strides and lost ground to his closest competitor, Hayes Binnicker from Powdersville. As the two dashed to the finish, they were neck-and-neck, mere inches separating the two runners.

Brown fell slightly behind at the last second, however. That’s when he made the call.

“He caught up to me at the very end, and I was like ‘oh, no.’ So I knew I had to dive to get over the finish line.”

Brown took two lunges and leaped into the air at the last possible moment, extending both arms forward — much like Superman himself — and poking his head out as far as it could go. The two runners crossed the finish line at nearly the exact same time.

Brown hit the ground with a thud, but his adrenaline masked the pain. He stood up and immediately went over to the electronic board with runner times, anxiously awaiting his result.

“As soon as I got up off the ground, I just stood there until my results showed up,” Brown said. “It was probably about 10 seconds until I saw them. And even when I saw them, I still wasn’t sure.”

The results came in, and they couldn’t have been any closer. Powdersville’s Binnicker timed in at 56.15 seconds.

As for Brown? He clocked in at 56.13 seconds.

Brown clinched the state championship by two-hundredths of a second.

Had he not gone full extension and laid everything on the line, he’d have come up just short.

“I knew as soon as he went ahead of me by a bit, the only way I was going to win was if I dived. I’d seen it done in the Olympics before maybe once, and I told myself, ‘if that’s what it takes, that’s what I’m going to do.’”

Blue Ridge track-and-field coach James Mclendon has been coaching at BRHS for 43 years and is retiring after this season. Throughout his entire storied tenure with the Tigers, he said, that was the first time he’d seen anything like it.

“Nobody’s going to sell out the way Hayden does,” Mclendon said. “He’s always been a competitor, and whatever it takes to win, he does. I’ve never seen anybody do that in any race. He did the ‘Superman’ on everybody, or as some people would say, he did a ‘Pete Rose’ on everybody.”

Brown kept the receipts from his incredible dive. He scraped and bloodied both knees hitting the ground, he said, and his chest is still bruised.

He doesn’t have any regrets, of course.

“It was definitely worth it,” Brown said. “I wanted to make it happen for Coach [Mclendon] since it’s his last year, and for myself, since it’s my last year and all. I knew I had to give it everything I had. My family and friends were all in the stands too, so I knew I had to make them proud. And I hope I did.”