HISTORY
In 2011, Bronx native Gene McCarthy – a championship runner at All Hallows, Fordham and a longtime, footwear executive at Nike, ASICS, Under Armour and Reebok - working as a board member of the Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy created the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame. In a ceremony at The Millrose Games in Madison Square Garden, the late Oregon legend Steve Prefontaine; USA Olympian and Villanova’s middle-distance ace Marty Liquori and Power Memorial/Oregon US Olympian Matt Centrowitz were inducted as the inaugural class.
However, in subsequent years, the “Vanny” Cross Country Hall of Fame was quietly abandoned. In 2022, Kerri Inman (Gallagher), the director of Cross Country, Track & Field at Manhattan College and Lou Vazquez, meet director of the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational joined Gene McCarthy to bring back the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame as an annual feature of the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational each October.
Legendary meet director and high school coach Ed Bowes, former Saratoga Springs High School & Oregon distance great Nicole (Blood) Freitag and pioneering cross country journalist Marc Bloom were selected as the 2022 class of the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame in a ceremony as part of the 50th Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational Presented by HOKA.
In 2023, scholastic stars Christine Curtin and Denis Cochran-Fikes, heralded Long Island high school coach Paul Limmer and long-time journalist Walt Murphy were inducted into the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame.
Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame Inductees
ED BOWES (2022) – The late Ed Bowes created the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational in 1972 and served as its meet director for 44 years. His modest goal was simply to create a meet for local runners. However, his invitational quickly developed into “the biggest and best” with over 400,000 scholastic runners from all across the nation competing through the years in his Van Cortlandt Park showcase. The long-time head cross country and track coach at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, Bowes also was known as a champion of girls’ participation in running. Leveraging the landmark 1973 Title IX law, Bowes pushed for girls’ participation and inclusion. He also insisted that girls got to race on the same day as the boys in an era where boys’ and girls’ cross country & track competitions were often segregated into specific boys or girls-only events. Bowes added a Girls Eastern States Championship to his Manhattan College meet in 1976, and that race has been named to honor his contributions.
NICOLE (BLOOD) FREITAG (2022) - The first woman to be inducted into the Van Cortlandt Park Cross Country Hall of Fame, Nicole Freitag - who raced as Nicole Blood - first gained national notoriety at Van Cortlandt in the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational in 2002. That year, she won the first of three consecutive individual Girls Eastern States Championship individual titles while also leading her Saratoga Springs (NY) team to three straight team crowns. In 2004, Blood established a new Van Cortlandt Park girls course record with a 13:57 clocking. She also captured three Foot Locker Northeast Regional titles at Van Cortlandt. Later as a member of the Oregon Ducks running dynasty, Blood became a nine-time cross country & track All American at Oregon. Nicole’s favorite Van Cortlandt Park memory? Winning 2006 USA U-20 Championships to earn a ticket to Japan representing Team USA.
MARC BLOOM (2022) - In a media career spanning almost 60 years—dating back to when he himself ran for his high school team on the Van Cortlandt Park trails in the early 1960s—Marc Bloom has been one of the biggest and most influential champions of scholastic cross-country. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was Bloom who helped put high school cross-country on the map with meet coverage and feature stories in The New York Times and other publications. As his career continued through the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, he created the first high school All-American teams, as well as regional and national high school team rankings through his “Harrier” cross-country magazine, vaulting cross-country to the peak of the running landscape. This lead to events like the Foot Locker Nationals, with its Northeast Regional at Van Cortlandt, Nike Cross Nationals (which Bloom helped start) and the Manhattan College Cross Country Invitational itself, in which Bloom served as an early advisor to event creator and long-time meet director Ed Bowes. Bloom’s accolades include being former editor-in-chief of The Runner magazine, as well as editor of Nike Swoosh magazine and Runner’s World High School Runner. His 2012 New York Times story, “A Century of Testing Runners’ Speed and Spirit,” celebrated the 100th anniversary of cross-country running at Van Cortlandt Park. Bloom – a high school runner at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn and a coach at St. Rose in Belmar, NJ - is also the author of ten books, a number of which also celebrated the role of “Vanny” in providing a valuable stepping stone for young runners and hosting an array of national events going back decades.
CHRISTINE CURTIN (2023) - This Mepham HS (Long Island) standout won the 1981 Girls’ Eastern States title as a sophomore in a time of 14:14.6, bettering the Van Cortlandt record by 24 seconds. Her biggest scholastic cross country accomplishment came in 1982 when she captured a national championship at the Kinney race, a 5K event then held in Florida. Later that year, she clocked the nation’s fastest scholastic time in winning the 3,000-meters at the junior nationals. Christine was a pioneer in those early years girls’ running, winning 14 state track and XC titles in her Mepham High School career, along with a pair of national championships. At Stanford University, she was a member of an NCAA national championship cross country team. Curtin was recently featured in an acclaimed sports documentary “The 5th Man” focusing on legendary Mepham coach Paul Limmer. Christine is now psychologist in the Bay Area specializing in positive psychology and coaching for teens and young adults.
DENIS FIKES (now Denis Cochran-Fikes) (2023) - This Rice (NYC) High School runner dominated VCP and cross country running during his CHSAA days winning two Boy’s Eastern States Championships. Fikes was undefeated in cross country his senior year while winning his third, consecutive titles at the NYU Interscholastic and CHSAA City Championships. Denis Fikes’ 1969 VCP personal-best 12:25.7 (New York State record) was second fastest ever at the time to Marty Liquori’s 12:23.2 in 1966. Fikes also excelled on the track establishing NYS records in the one, two and three-mile events, blazing a trail as one of the first black sub-four minute milers. Following this success, Fikes was the subject of a rigorous college recruiting process, opting for the University of Pennsylvania and eventually running a 3:55 mile. That ranked second in USA at that time and 15th fastest ever recorded. After serving as an officer and a coach with the US Marines, Fikes returned to Penn earning his MBA from the Wharton School, and then ventured to Harvard where he was an athletic administrator and coach. His Harvard women’s Cross Country finished 4th in the 1983 NCAA Championships, and in 1984, he was named NCAA District 1 coach of the year. He returned to Penn in 1986 where he served as associate athletic director and director of compliance through 2017. Denis is also a member of the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame and Belmont Plateau Hall of Fame.
PAUL LIMMER (2023) - One of the nation’s most successful high school coaches, Limmer created a running powerhouse as head coach for 35 years at Mepham High School in Bellmore, Long Island. In 1980, his boys’ team established a Van Cortlandt 5-man average standard of 16:12 over 5,000- meters, a record that still stands. In 1979, he started the girls’ program at Mepham and by the time he retired in 1999, the Mepham girls’ cross country team had compiled a 153-2 XC dual meet record. Mepham’s 1982 championship girls’ team – anchored by former Van Cortlandt Park course record holder and 2023 Van Cortlandt Park XC Hall of Famer Christine Curtin – captured the New York State XC title and is still considered Long Island’s best scholastic XC team ever. Limmer was recently featured in an acclaimed sports documentary “The 5th Man” focusing on his coaching career at Mepham where he positively impacted thousands of runners who credit Limmer for changing their lives.
WALT MURPHY (2023) - A longtime NYC cross country writer, Murphy has covered scholastic and collegiate cross country for over four decades in his two publications: Eastern Track and X-Country X-Press. He continues to report on the history of cross country as well as track & field in his daily feature – This Day in Track & Field. Murphy had a 40-year career as NBC’s Olympic/track & field stats chief, and also contributed on track & field broadcasts with ABC, CBS, ESPN and TBS. While an award-winning journalist, he has also served as a volunteer for almost all of the past 51 Manhattan College Cross Country Invitationals in Van Cortlandt Park.
