Bloom Trail Grad Cato Places 2nd in Heptathlon at NCAA Indoor Championships

Bloom Trail High School graduate Japheth Cato put his best foot forward.

Cato, a two-time Big Ten heptathlon champ and All-America honoree at the University of Wisconsin, was clocked in a personal-best 2 minutes 49.34 seconds in the 1000 meters at the 2012 NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championships in Nampa, Idaho.

He led the heptathlon after six of the seven events and was poised to bring home his first national championship on Saturday, March 10. Then came the unthinkable. His bid to win the title was derailed in world-record fashion by Duke’s Curtis Beach.

Beach powered to a world-record time of 2:23.63 in the 1000 meters, knocking four seconds off his previous mark. The effort enabled Beach to overtake Cato in a scintillating 1-2 battle between the two rivals for the heptathlon crown, 6,138 points to 6,082.

Cato’s second-place finish—the best ever turned in by a Big Ten athlete in the NCAA heptathlon—was good for a new Wisconsin school record. He earned praise from Badgers coach Ed Nuttycombe in a news release posted on the University of Wisconsin athletics website earlier this week.

“Just a few years ago, it would have been unfathomable to score like that and not win,” Nuttycombe said. “The way the heptathlon keeps exploding is just amazing. There’s not much to say about what Cato did today. He was fantastic and the numbers speak for themselves.”

“I felt like I was running a good pace to go over (6,000 points) and maybe even win it, but it went the way it did,” Cato said in the UW release. “It just tells me I have to be better, train harder and run faster.”

Cato is a 6-3 sophomore from Crete, Ill.