Carter, Felix Simply Dashing

One of them accomplished something that had never been done before.

The other did something that had been done only once.

So it came as no surprise when Xavier Carter of Palmetto (Fla.) Palm Bay and Allyson Felix of North Hills L.A. Baptist were selected as the boys’ and girls’ athletes of the meet at the 36th running of the Arcadia Invitational track and field meet Saturday night.

Carter, the defending Florida state 3-A Division champion in the boys’ 200 and 400 meters, won the 100 in a career-best and meet-record 10.38 seconds, the 400 in 46.72 and the 200 in 20.85 to become the first athlete to win all three of those events in the same meet at Arcadia.

Felix, the defending California state champion in the girls’ 100 and 200, won the former in a wind-aided 11.29 and the latter in 22.97 to become the second girl to win three consecutive Arcadia titles in the 100 and 200.

The first was Marion Jones, who won the 100 and 200 during her sophomore year at Oxnard Rio Mesa in 1991 and her junior and senior years at Thousand Oaks in 1992 and ’93.

“You try not to get ahead of yourself,” the 6-foot-4, 195-pound Carter said when asked about how he approached his races. “You have to run one race before you can run the next one.”

Carter had to overtake junior Derrick Jones of Long Beach Poly in the final 30 meters of the 100 while breaking the meet record of 10.40 set by Henry Thomas of Hawthorne in 1985, but he overpowered his opponents in the 400 and 200.

Felix got out of the blocks quickly in both of her races to win the 100 by .16 seconds and the 200 by 1.38.

“I definitely wanted to work on my technique,” Felix said about her 100 performance, the fastest ever posted at Arcadia under any conditions. “I was hoping for a time in the 11.3s. I definitely wanted to run a [personal record].”

Senior Mike Morrison of Willingboro, N.J., and the Long Beach Poly girls’ 400 and 1,600 relay teams had some of the other top performances in the meet.

Morrison, who attends the same high school that Carl Lewis did, cleared a meet-record 7 feet 3 inches in the boys’ high jump before missing three times at 7-5.

The Poly girls, fresh off a national record in the 800-meter sprint medley relay on Friday night, won the 400 relay in 45.01 and the 1,600 relay in 3:43.03.