EUGENE, Ore. — UGA track and field has its third national champion.
Junior high jumper Elena Kulichenko won her first national title on the final day of the NCAA outdoor championships on Saturday.
The Odinstsovo, Russia native finished at a height of 1.97 meters or 6-feet, 5.5-inches. This score tied Illinois’ Rose Yeboah for a title. The pair, alongside Texas Tech’s Temitope Adeshina — who finished third due to missed attempts — set a new meet record.
Yeboah and Kulichenko beat out the previous record, which was set by UCLA’s Amy Acuffin 1995, by .01 meter or half an inch.
Kulichenko moved to the fourth-best placement on the all-time collegiate list. She also broke her own school record by almost a foot. She set the record at the most recent SEC outdoor championship.
She’s the third Bulldog to win a national championship at the 2024 outdoor championships, joining sophomore sprinter Christopher Morales Williams and graduate thrower Marc Minichello. Morales Williams won the 400 meter — which he also won at the NCAA indoor championships — and Minichello won in javelin.
Minichello, Morales Williams and Kulichenko won Georgia’s 19th, 20th and 21st NCAA individual outdoor titles, respectively. The three were each big for their respective team’s top 10 performances. The men’s team finished in ninth, while the women’s team finished in 10th.
Arkansas won the women’s outdoor tournament, while Florida, who won the men’s tournament, took second place.
While Kulichenko netted the women’s team their most amount of points, several other women had productive performances.
Sophomore sprinter Kaila Jackson took a fifth and sixth place finish in the 100 meter and 200 meter respectively. She finished with an 11-second time in the 100 and a 22.68-second time in the 200.
This earned her second consecutive First Team All-America certificate for the 100, and her first in the 200. Jackson, as a result, became the first Georgia track and field athlete to score All-American in both races in the same meet since Debbie Ferguson in 1996.
Senior Mikeisha Welcome, in likely her last meet, took fifth place in the high jump. She finished with a season-best 13.65 meters.
Finally, the 4x400 meter team of Kimberly Harris, Aaliyah Butler, Sydney Harris and Haley Tate finished with a fourth-place time of 3:24.26, just missing the podium.
With the Bulldogs wrapping up and Georgia baseball finishing its season on Monday, Georgia athletics has officially completed its 2023-2024 season.
Several track and field athletes will possibly next be seen in Georgia’s cross-country season in the fall of 2024 or will start preparing for Olympic qualifiers.