The track is lighting up at the Big Ten Track and Field Championships–literally. The penultimate meet of the 2025 NCAA indoor season began on Friday morning at the Fall Creek Pavilion in Indianapolis, and just a few hours into the competition, flames were spotted on the centre straightaway. In a post shared on Instagram, meet officials can be seen stomping on the small fire, in an attempt to extinguish it.
The flames were eventually put out, leaving a blackened patch across lanes five and six of the eight-lane 60m straightaway. The chaos reportedly unfolded after a charging cellphone caught fire. “The person who is responsible can’t respond because they don’t have a phone anymore… probably,” one comment on the Instagram post read. Others are also making light of the situation, joking, “The Big 10 Championship is officially underway and the track is already on fire.”
Apparently a phone charger caught fire on the track at the Big Ten Indoor Champs.
— RunnerSpace (@runnerspace) February 28, 2025
The 60m and 60m hurdles semi-final events were reseeded to avoid the two scorched lanes, placing only six athletes in each heat instead of eight. The rearrangement will require the event’s final on Saturday to have two sections, instead of one.
Will Savannah Sutherland break the Canadian record?
Borden, Sask.’s 400m hurdles star Savannah Sutherland challenged her own Canadian indoor 400m record in Friday’s Big Ten prelims, clocking 51.77 to fall short of the mark by a mere 0.17 seconds. Her performance marks the fastest 400m by a Canadian this year. The University of Michigan athlete heads into Saturday’s conference final with the fastest seed; two-time national U20 champion Ella Clayton of Calgary will join her on the line.
