THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON — Canadian Taylor Milne finished second in the men’s mile Saturday at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, missing out on first place by less than a second.
Milne, from Guelph, Ont., finished in three minutes 56.4 seconds, just behind the winning time of 3:56.01 set by Ireland’s Ciaran O’Lionaird.
The race was supposed to be a matchup between Britain’s Mo Farah and his training partner, American Galen Rupp, but Farah’s heel was clipped in the fourth turn of the first lap and he went down, hands-first.
"Somebody just caught my leg. I’ve got very, very long strides," said Farah, who fell in Birmingham, England, in 2007 and got up and ran the wrong way. "I wasn’t going to do that today."
Farah worked his way back to the pack: He was fifth with four laps left and in second place with three to go. But by the seventh of eight laps, he had fallen to fourth.
"We were planning on taking it about half-way," said Rupp, the American record-holder in the 10,000 metres. "You’ve got to be ready for anything."
Farah had droplets of blood on his right ankle where he was stepped on but was not otherwise injured; after the meet, he and Rupp ran training laps for more than 30 minutes as workers disassembled the infield.
O’Lionaird was surprised at his good luck.
"Any time I step onto the track with these guys, it’s a learning experience," he said. "It’s such a privilege."
In another close finish, Maggie Vessey outstretched Erica Moore at the tape to win the women’s 800 metres by four one-thousandths of a second.
Vessey squeezed through on the inside edge of lane one and leaned over the finish line. She finished in two minutes 2.361 seconds; Moore came in at 2:02.365.
Vessey was the silver medallist at the U.S. championships last year, and she placed sixth at worlds.
World champion Kirani James of Grenada won the men’s 400 metres in 45.96 seconds — the fastest in the world so far this year. Adam Nelson won the shot put with a throw of 21.27 metres. That’s short of his meet record of 21.65 metres he set in 1995.
In other events:
–Jenn Suhr broke her own American record in the pole vault with a height of 4.87 metres. She was not available for comment; meet organizers said she had a sore Achilles tendon but was still planning to compete in the Millrose Games in New York next week.
–Meseret Defar won the women’s 3,000 metres, and fellow Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba won the women’s two-mile run.
–Caleb Ndiku of Kenya won the men’s 3,000 metres by about one-half second over Ethiopia’s Dejen Gebremeskel. Gebremeskel won the race last year despite losing his shoe near the start and running the rest of the race without it. American Matthew Centrowitz was seventh and Andy Baddeley of Great Britain was eighth.