North's painful loss at GWAL swimming

Though I was standing beside her, I couldn’t quite believe it when the official starter disqualified Wichita North’s 4x400-yard freestyle relay and cost the Redskins the championship of the City League swim meet Thursday night.
Then she repeated it into a microphone for all to hear.
I looked from an East High swimmer still trying to complete the race, to the finish where, sure enough, three North swimmers were now in the water, prematurely celebrating victory.
That was the basis of the disqualification – jumping into the water before the race was finished.
I didn’t know about that rule, and I wonder whether all the North girls did. It makes sense, in a way.
But East was the only team still swimming and so far behind (almost a full length of the pool when North touched home first) that it was almost out of sight and out of mind. And the Blue Aces were three lanes away, hardly where the North celebration would affect their ability to finish.
But as someone said, a rule’s a rule.
The North girls were understandably grief-stricken.
It’s probably no consolation, but there are two things I would say to them.
First, you may not have a medal to show for it, and it won’t be in the record book, but you know you won the race, you know you won the meet, you know you are champions. The medal would have been forgotten in a couple of weeks, tossed in a drawer somewhere at home, most likely forgotten as you moved along with your lives.
Second, winning that meet is not the most important thing you’ll ever do. You have a lifetime ahead of you. Whether you go on to college or straight to jobs, you will have bigger, more important and probably more rewarding challenges in school, maybe in sports, certainly in careers or vocations.
As a heavily favored U.S. athlete once said after failing to make the Olympic 200-meter final in 1992: “The sun will come up tomorrow. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s shining out there somewhere right now.”
Michael Johnson did OK after that. In a career that lasted another nine years, he went on to win five Olympic gold medals and set two world records.
The North girls will be OK too, though they sure didn’t feel like it Thursday night.