BATON ROUGE- Peta-Gaye Dowdie of the No. 1-ranked LSU women’s track and field team was selected as the SEC Women’s Track and Field Athlete of the Week Wednesday following her national leading 200-meter performance at the Gator Invitational in Gainesville, Fla., this past weekend.
The senior from St. Catherine, Jamaica opened defense of her NCAA Indoor 200-meter title with a blazing time of 23.48 seconds, better than three-tenths of a second faster than the next best time recorded in the college ranks in 2000. Dowdie is the nation’s only NCAA automatic qualifier in the 200 for the NCAA Indoor Championships in March.
A year ago Dowdie opened the 1999 indoor season with a 23.66 in the 200 before going on to win the NCAA title and nearly break the NCAA record with a time of 22.83. She is one of only five women in NCAA history to run under 23 seconds in the 200-meter dash indoors and came within .04 of owning the NCAA record as a junior.
Dowdie becomes the second Lady Tiger track and field athlete to win the honor this season. Triple jumper Keisha Spencer earned the honor on Jan. 19.
Dowdie will travel to Lincoln, Neb., this weekend in search of an NCAA qualifier in the 60-meter dash at the Frank Sevigne Invitational. Dowdie has been an NCAA indoor qualifier in the event in each of the previous three seasons, but has only run the event once so far this season.