Broken Arrow 4.6 Mile Girls U-14: Ten-Year-Old Veda Caputo-Wilkowski Runs Away With It

• Veda Caputo-Wilkowski, age 10, wins in 52:18 — more than three minutes clear of the field at 11:27/mi, the fastest pace in the U-14 girls' race.
• Lelia Martin edges Stella Streit for 4th — both cross in 59:19, but Martin claims the spot by less than half a second (59:19.34 vs. 59:19.75).
• Ella Brooks, age 9, finishes 12th in 1:06:43 — the youngest finisher in the field, completing a mountain course at altitude that challenged runners nearly twice her age.
• Hana Carpenter and Corina Geiger separated by just 0.50 seconds at the back of the pack — Carpenter 18th in 1:13:22.10, Geiger 19th in 1:13:22.60.

Veda Caputo-Wilkowski is ten years old and from Laramie, Wyoming — and she absolutely dominated the Girls U-14 field on the slopes above Olympic Valley. Her 52:18 finish at an 11:27/mi clip left a 3:09 gap to runner-up Bailey Betts (55:27, 12:09/mi), a margin that speaks for itself on a course ranging up to 7,500 feet. Whether Laramie's own elevation helped her handle the thin air is an open question, but there was nothing thin about her performance.

Betts, 13, from Highlands Ranch, CO, held second comfortably, with Siya Dalal (age 12, Cupertino, CA) rounding out the podium in 56:40. Then came one of the afternoon's sharpest moments: Lelia Martin (age 11, Truckee) and Stella Streit (age 11, also Truckee) crossed the line in an almost identical 59:19 — but the clock doesn't lie at the decimal level. Martin's 59:19.34 gave her 4th, Streit's 59:19.75 gave her 5th, separated by 0.41 seconds after nearly an hour of racing. Ave Adriani (age 13, Olympic Valley) finished just 24 seconds back in 6th at 59:43.

The cluster from 7th through 9th was equally tight: Ellery Metres (1:02:04), Simona Spalekova (1:02:06), and Juniper Woolf (1:02:36) were all within 32 seconds of each other. The same drama played out at the very end of the field, where Hana Carpenter (18th, 1:13:22.10) and Corina Geiger (19th, 1:13:22.60) finished half a second apart after more than 73 minutes on the mountain. Nineteen girls finished this course — from a 9-year-old to a 13-year-old — and the racing was fierce from front to back.