BATON ROUGE – LSU’s former NCAA Champion Vernon Norwood earned the right to represent the United States at the World Championships for the second time in his career when he outlasted the field for the victory in the men’s 400-meter final in 45.80 seconds on Saturday at the 2016 USA Track & Field Indoor Championships in Portland, Oregon.
Running nearly a second faster than his closest competitor in Friday’s qualifying with a time of 45.81, Norwood captured his first USATF Indoor title as a professional by more than one tenth of a second as he beat silver medalist Kyle Clemons (45.95) and bronze medalist Elvyonn Bailey (46.22) to the finish line.
Norwood’s victory earned him a spot on Team USA that will play host to the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Championships on the same track at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland beginning in just four days.
Norwood is emerging as one of the elite young quartermilers in the United States in the wake of his senior season at LSU in 2015 when he swept NCAA Indoor and NCAA Outdoor titles in the 400 meters. He followed a memorable collegiate season with an outstanding summer as he made his World Championships debut outdoors after winning the 400-meter bronze medal at the USATF Outdoor Championships.
Competing in his first World Championships in Beijing, Norwood advanced to the semifinal round of the men’s 400 meters while also winning a gold medal as a member of Team USA’s World Champion 4×400 relay with an appearance in the preliminary round. He ended the 2015 season as one of the top-ranked 400-meter sprinters in the world with a personal best of 44.44.
The Morgan City, Louisiana, native is among three LSU athletes that will be competing at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Portland next week as former Tiger All-American Gabriel Mvumvure will race in the 60-meter dash for Zimbabwe and LSU’s senior national champion Fitzroy Dunkley could line up in the 400 meters and 4×400-meter relay for Jamaica.
Dunkley is coming off a pair of All-American performances at the NCAA Indoor Championships in Birmingham this weekend where he raced to a fifth-place finish nationally in the 400 meters and anchored the Tigers to the NCAA Indoor title in the 4×400-meter relay on Saturday night.