Late in the spring, when the high school track season was in full-throttle, Tony Smoragiewicz had an impossible decision to make. After his sub-9 minute finish in the 3,000-meter run at the Arcadia, California track meet, USA track team coaches had seen enough. The Central High School distance phenom was put on a very short list of long distance runners being considered for the World Junior Track Championships in Rome this summer. It was the opportunity of a lifetime…and he turned it down.

While distance-running fans have cheered Tony’s triumphs on the track, his passion has always been the octopus of endurance sports–the triathlon.

When he sat down with his parents to consider the possibility of going to Rome, he told them, “I’m going to focus on triathlon this summer.”

It’s not like there was no gold at the end of the triathlon rainbow. The Junior World Championships will be held in Beijing in September (so much for the beginning of AP Calculus). But Tony would have to swim/bike/run the gauntlet of a Pan American Triathlon qualifying race in Edmonton, Canada against the best young triathletes in the western hemisphere.

The race was Sunday morning. It was cold and rainy. Mosquitoes were the size of dive bombers. Tony came in 2nd in a field of 72 elite junior runners, only a few seconds behind friend and cross-country rival Lukas Vervbicas of Chicago.

Vervbicas won the national Nike and Footlocker cross country challenges last winter, and is only the third junior ever to ever record a sub-four minute mile. Tony came in 9th in the Nike and 3rd in the Footlocker races.

The Edmonton race was marred by controversy and mishap from the beginning, but never seemed to affect the showdown between the top two. “I came out of the swim in 40th place,” Tony told me just after the race. “I should have come out of the swim closer to the front, but half the 72 swimmers took a shortcut. I saw them do it, but I stuck to the official course.” Lukas came out of the water just ahead of Tony, but Tony caught him on the bicycle course, where, once again, the race got ugly. Two Mexican bicyclists, perhaps thinking they were confronting Vervbicas, the front-runner, pushed an American off his bike. It was all irrelevant to Tony. By the end of the bicycle section, it was a four man race, with Vervbicas and Tony neck-in-neck, followed by fellow American Ben Kanupe, and a Mexican runner who passed Kanupe half way through the run. “We were talking about whether we should begin to make a move,” Tony explained. “But also it’s a situation where Lukas makes a surge, and I make a surge. We can just feel each other.”

Tony won’t have much time to rest on his triumph. Next Saturday he will be in Des Moines, Iowa for the Flatland Junior Elite Cup. He then travels to Portland for the Nike Cross Country Camp, and ends up in San Diego the first week in August for the Triathlon Junior National Championships.

Then…it’s on to Beijing.