"She passed me at the second hurdle," Taylor said. "It was hard for me to feel like I wasn't running in the slow motion. But I knew I had to stay focussed and just run my own race."

With Patterson fading on the final hurdle, the race came down to Taylor and UCLA's Sheela Johnson, who was still running strong. But Taylor held for the win.

"It was a tight race, and it came down to the last hurdle," Taylor said. "I just happened to have the momentum at that last hurdle."

Patterson placed third at 56.76 seconds, while Johnson clocked in at 56.23 seconds.

Taylor's time of 56.11 seconds was over a half-second improvement from her previous best, a 56.64 second run in the preliminaries of the 2000 Olympic Trials. Yesterday's performance will give her confidence in her quest to close her Harvard career with an NCAA title. She earned All-American honors with a seventh-place finish at NCAAs last season.

"This was exactly what I needed," Taylor said. "I had never beaten [Patterson] before, so this was a big boost for me."

Gyorffy's first-place finish in the high jump wasn't quite as suspenseful as Taylor's victory. Ultimately, the only suspense was whether she would break the meet record, and how high she would go.