Oz Pearlman Wins Firecracker 8K For Third Straight Time

It wasn’t exactly how he wanted to become a three-time champion of the Firecracker 8K, but he’ll take it.

Oz Pearlman was declared the winner of the 31st annual race in Southampton Village on Sunday morning — but it almost didn’t happen. A snafu, where the lead pace car made a wrong turn down the final stretch of the race, pulled the 39-year-old Brooklyn and Southampton resident off course. James Loeffel, who had been leading the first half of the race along with his brother John Loeffel, wound up taking the lead down that final stretch and initially won the race in 26:31.92.

Just prior to announcing the overall and age group winners, race coordinator James Grossi brought together all parties involved — Pearlman, the Loeffel brothers, and other witnesses — to come up with an amicable solution. After some discussion, it was agreed that Pearlman would be declared the winner in 26:30, just under James Loeffel’s finishing time.

“There was a little bit of confusion at the end of the race there, and depending on who you talk to, you get different stories, but the lead car did turn off the course a bit earlier than it was supposed to, and the lead runner followed,” Grossi explained. “At the end of the day, we just want to do what’s right and fair, and mistakes happen. We’re not here to blame anyone.

“The way I look at it is, if the cop had a call he needed to go to and left and the lead car followed him, is the lead runner now going to follow them?” he added. “The pace car is always there to help out, but it should never actually be your guide. The course is marked out clearly and runners should know the course. And we’ll address that prior to next year’s race, but I think we came to an amicable agreement and everybody left there happy, I think.”

Pearlman, to his credit, did all that he could to try to get back to the front of the race after making the wrong turn. He also had a good amount of data on him that had his splits and where he would have finished had he not went off course, which would have been close to last year’s time of 25:57. What Pearlman was probably most upset about was that it was an overall great race for him. The Loeffel brothers, who are 21, took the race out fast to start, but about halfway through, on Meadow Lane, Pearlman was trailing right behind the brothers and eventually overtook them, and had the lead, and basically the win, in hand before the pace car error.

Pearlman has now won the Firecracker three years in a row, 2019, 2021 and 2022 — the race did not happen in 2020 due to the pandemic.

“Great day. Hot, but hot is my forte, I like hot,” he said after the race. “I haven’t been training that hard. I mean, I’ve been training but not for speed. And these two young kids, they’re fast. So they went out fast — age over beauty, though. At mile 2, I got them locked in on Meadow Lane, and then blood in the water, man. I started seeing them slow down, feeling that they weren’t ready for the heat, and they went out too fast. Whereas I like those negative splits, so I like to get faster as I go.”

It was also a solid race for the Loeffel brothers, who are originally from Queens and were competitive cross country runners at Archbishop Molloy before running competitively for Seton Hall University, where they now run on the cross country teams there. James said he was coming off some injuries from this past season and therefore hadn’t trained all that much recently and was trying to keep up with his brother, John, who wound up finishing third overall in 27:14.48.

“We took a little time off after getting out of school in May, and we’ve just been training pretty easy ever since because we got a pretty tough cross country season coming up — and it’s lengthy as well, it ends sometime in mid December. So just trying to get a few races under us, just to keep that feeling going, keep the fire going, see what we need to work on,” James Loeffel explained after the race. “Halfway through the race, we were kind of falling off a bit, but then you regain that strength in your mind and you look back. Once you see someone close, you just have to keep going on, that’s the only way to do it.”

Jeffery Ares, 38, of New York City finished fourth overall in 27:25.15 while Cole Flychr, 25, rounded out the top five in 29:24.67. Rhys Drout, 21, of Boston was the female champion, crossing the finish line in 34:06.76. Eleanor Williamson, 50, of Westhampton Beach came in right after Drout in 34:42.11, and Rose Hayes, 18, and a recent graduate of Westhampton Beach High School, was the third female to cross the finish line in 35:30.38.

Complete results can be found at elitefeats.com.

Drout was in complete surprise when she found she was the female champ, having not run competitively since she attended high school. She just recently graduated from Princeton. She was in Southampton over the weekend visiting a friend, and they all decided to run in the race.

Grossi said the turnout was great, with over 400 runners and walkers — there was also a 3-mile walk/run. The 400 or so was well over the 125 runners that ran back in October, when the Southampton Rotary brought back the race after the pandemic. But those numbers are not quite back up to the numbers the race had pre-COVID, so Grossi said he will continue to try to bump those numbers up for next year.

The Firecracker 8K is the primary fundraiser for the Southampton Rotary Scholarship and Endowment Fund, which provides local students with scholarships and supports other important community groups across Southampton Town, including local fire and ambulance squads, Little League and other youth groups, food banks and other nonprofits like the Ellen Hermanson Foundation for Breast Cancer and the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation.

The club this year was able to secure a major sponsor in Weill Cornell Medicine, which recently opened a new Southampton location on County Road 39, a connection forged by Rotary Club member Kevin Luss.

This year’s race also gave participants an opportunity to donate directly to support the people of Ukraine, with those funds flowing to Rotary International to assist in that organization’s relief efforts.