The 2018 class of the UW Athletic Hall of Fame has been selected and one new member will be announced each day from July 9-19. Visit UWBadgers.com each day to celebrate each new member of this distinguished and historic class of Badgers!
BY ANDY BAGGOT
UWBadgers.com Insider
MADISON, Wis. — Simon Bairu was born in Saudi Arabia and spent some of his early life in Greece before his family put down roots in Canada.
Now Bairu lives in Oregon and travels the world looking for the next wave of elite track athletes on behalf of Nike.
In between Bairu spent four years in Madison as a member of the Wisconsin men's cross country and track teams.
Turns out his time with the Badgers was so distinguished, so personally impactful, that Bairu still maintains the 608 cell phone number he had as a student-athlete even though he left town more than a decade ago.
"I wanted to keep that connection to Wisconsin," he explained. "I really have some fond memories from there."
Getting ahold of Bairu these days is an exercise in joyful recall because his one-of-a-kind career is being immortalized.
Bairu is part of an 11-person class being inducted in the University of Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame on Sept. 7.
"My time there really molded who I am,'' he said. "It's really special to be recognized and be on the wall with some pretty legendary people."
Bairu won NCAA individual cross country titles in 2004 and '05, the latter setting the stage for the fourth of five national team crowns won by the Badgers.
Winning consecutive individual championships is a rare feat. Going back to 1938, Bairu was the ninth of 11 competitors in NCAA history to win the race in back-to-back years, joining the legendary likes of Gerry Lindgren, Steve Prefontaine and Henry Rono.
Asked which feat meant more — his distinguished double or the team title — Bairu doesn't hesitate.
"Easy," he said. "Winning the national championship in '05."
The journey to the top of that podium was as painful as it was instructive. The Badgers placed second in 2002, '03 and '04 and their four-point loss to Colorado, leading to their third straight runner-up finish, was seen as a major upset.
"In our eyes we'd kind of choked," said Chris Solinsky, a UW Hall of Fame inductee in 2017, a five-time national titlist who was a year behind Bairu.
"We were overly confident and maybe not as focused as we could have been," Bairu said. "It was devastating. We should have dominated that race and we didn't."
Bairu said the lesson was not to take anything for granted.
"I never realized how much I wanted the team title until '04 because I won the individual title in '04 and our team lost," he said. "There was just something in me that wouldn't allow me to celebrate. The guys were celebrating for me, but I just had this empty feeling in my stomach."
Bairu, from Regina, Saskatchewan, was named captain of the cross country team heading into his senior year. He remembers a point he made during the team meeting the night before the NCAA race in Terra Haute, Indiana.
"The hardest part is all the work we did to get to this point," he told his teammates. "The easiest portion of the journey is the race itself.
"When we got to the starting line," Bairu said, "we were hungry, we were ready. Nothing had to be said that day. We executed."
The Badgers dominated the field, outdistancing 11-time champion Arkansas by 68 points. Bairu, Solinsky (third) and Matt Withrow (ninth) all placed in the top 10.
"I remember the night before the race," Solinsky said. "Simon and I kind of got together and said, 'We've got to get this done.'"
They did.
"I can't imagine a better send-off than winning the individual title and getting the team title," Bairu said. "That was pretty special. That's probably the most memorable moment of my career."
In addition to his work on the national stage, Bairu was part of 10 Big Ten Conference championship teams in cross country (four), indoor track (three) and outdoor track (three).
"He's very much an underrated talent," Solinsky said of his close friend. "Sometimes I think he doesn't get the credit he deserves for how amazing of an athlete he is."
Solinsky, now an assistant track and cross country coach at Florida, has such high regard for Bairu that he chose him as the best man for his wedding in 2009.
"He's the type of guy you can always rely on," Solinsky said of Bairu. "He's just that friend who's there in all capacities."
Those traits translated to how Bairu prepared and performed in the heat of battle.
"As a teammate he was as steady as you could possibly be," Solinsky said. "He was the guy keeping the ship afloat from the inside.
"He kind of put a lot of weight on his own shoulders. Though they weren't very broad shoulders, they could carry a lot of weight."
Solinsky, from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, said Bairu was a fierce competitor whose ability to push past the pain was uncanny. Solinsky went on to describe the 2005 Big Ten cross country meet when Bairu executed one of his mid-race breakaways.
Bairu was known for making a definitive move three-fourths into a race.
"He'd drop an insanely fast surge," Solinsky said of a 500-meter segment at a 4-minute mile pace.
"I went in with the mentality that I know what he's going to do and when it's going to happen and I'm just going to wait for it. He still blew my doors off.
"He had that ability, even if he was hurting, to dig down even further."
Bairu, 34, is the son of an Eritrean father and Ethiopian mother. They settled in Canada when Simon was 3.
Bairu became a runner by chance. He got into a fight with another student when he was an eighth grader and was given a choice: Be suspended for a week or join the local running club.
In addition to his exploits at Wisconsin, Bairu won a record seven Canadian national cross country titles, but injuries forced him to retire from the international running scene in 2014.
Bairu currently oversees recruiting and signing African distance runners, mainly from Kenya and Ethiopia, for Nike.
"I've stayed very close to the sport, for which I'm very fortunate," he said.
Bairu made his way to Portland, Oregon, after graduation to run with Jerry Schumacher, a Wisconsin alum who coached the Badgers in cross country from 1997 to 2007.
Schumacher left Madison to work with elite distance runners on behalf of Nike's Bowerman Track Club and was named USA Track & Field's 2017 Coach of the Year. Bairu said Schumacher shaped his world in countless, positive ways.
"I learned how to deal with adversity, how to deal with success, how to lead," Bairu said. "Basically everything that's gotten me to the point where I'm at and the job that I have are through the life lessons he taught me at Wisconsin."
Schumacher called Bairu a "hard-nosed competitor" who did whatever was necessary to get ready for a race, adding that had he redshirted Bairu as a freshman "maybe he would have won three back-to-back-to-back" NCAA individual titles.
Bairu would have been the first runner to do that.
"He's worthy of being in the hall of fame just for that," Schumacher said.
UW Athletic Hall of Fame Class of 2018
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