A RECORD-SETTING FINAL GOES DOWN TO THE WIRE

For most of the day, coaches, swimmers, parents and friends were milling about the Long Beach Belmont Plaza Pool in chaotic fashion during the CIF-SS Division 1 swimming finals.

Midway through the day, everything stopped. All eyes were diverted to lanes four and five for the 50-yard freestyle final. Yucaipa's Karl Krug and Redlands' Joey Hale walked toward their lanes, smiled and wished each other good luck, and got on the blocks.

The two friends have been swimming rivals for years, competing for the same club team. In the preliminaries, Krug went first and broke the CIF record with a time of 20.05 seconds. Hale was up next. He blew away the field and stretched for the wall, finishing with the exact same time of 20.05 seconds as the crowd erupted.

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Mark Zaleski / The Press-Enterprise

Redlands' Joey Hale (above) edged Yucaipa's Karl Krug in the Division 50-meter freestyle final.

"I thought the clock was broken," Krug said afterwards.

Both would go into the finals as the No. 1 seed.

So here they were, in lanes right next to each other, in the quickest race of the day. It's just down to the wall and back, all of 20 seconds or less. All eyes were on them, the cheers nearly rendering the starting buzzer inaudible. Then they went off.

They were neck and neck the entire stretch and it looked like it would be a tie again, but Hale gave it one last stretch and won by three-hundredths of a second, in 19.95 seconds. Krug finished in 19.98, marking the first time two swimmers went under 20 seconds in the same race.

Such a spectacular race earned it the HS GameTime Boys Event of the Year.

"You don't see that often, you don't see 19s," Yucaipa coach Frank Solis said. "Very rarely do you see two 19s in the same state, let alone the same section, let alone the same heat. I can't think of two kids that deserve it more.

"I look back and my heart starts pumping."