He fits the bill

Let’s hope this won’t endanger Andrew Kimpel’s amateur standing.

For his fourth-place finish in the junior men’s race at Saturday’s USA Cross Country Championships on Saturday, the Washington State University freshman from Spokane won more than just a trip to the world championships.

He won a dollar to go along with it.

It was 1982 when Kimpel’s former coach at North Central High School, Jon Knight, made the world championship team himself. On the flight to the race in Rome, a 90-year-old priest he’d struck up a conversation with gave him a dollar bill for good luck.

“So he always gave us copies of that dollar for good luck,” said Kimpel, who ran on NC’s national championship team of 2008, “and he said, ‘If any of you guys make the world team, I’ll give you the actual dollar.’ ”

That buck took its first return trip to worlds when NC’s Laura Hodgson made the junior team to Switzerland in 2003. On Saturday, Kimpel clutched the bill – folded and laminated – in his hand after finishing the 8-kilometer race in a lifetime-best 24 minutes, 19 seconds – 15 seconds behind winner Trevor Dunbar of the University of Portland. The top six qualified for the IAAF World Championships next month in Bygdoszcz, Poland.

Knight’s advice: “Don’t lose it.”

“My current coach (Pete Julian) made the world cross team a few times,” Kimpel said, “and to have the national championships in my hometown was very special.”

Likewise, it was a special day for another local runner – 14-year-old Mead freshman Andrew Gardner, the youngest runner in the race, finished 14th in a field of 35 in 25:13.