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"Off The Record"
A Blog by Jill
M. Geer
More musings from Eugene
Sunday, June 28, 2009
A few more of my favorite athletes had performances worth writing about on Sunday.
Future first-ballot Hall of Famer Stacy Dragila made the team for Berlin by placing third in the women's pole vault, jumping 4.55 meters/14 feet, 11 inches. I've always been a huge fan of Stacy, who, at just seven months younger than yours truly, is a former world champion, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder.
There are many things I love about Ms. Dragila, who first was known as a former goat roper who took up pole vaulting. (She's also a former gymnast and heptathlete.) Somewhere along the way, she managed to shed that rodeo moniker and instead simply became known as the original, and most dynamic, pioneer in the women's vault. She won the first world title in the event. First Olympic gold medal. Set boatloads of world records. Etc etc.
The event couldn't have had a better ambassador. Over and over, she told her fans and the media about her first scary attempts over a pole vault bar, about the friendships she made along the way, and about her hopes for the women's pole vault. Crummy luck and an ill-timed Achilles injury in 2004 took her off the top of her game, but she has come back, at least for 2009, to possibly end her career on a positive note. Earlier in 2009 she had spoken openly about how this, at age 38, would be her last year, but in Eugene on Sunday she hedged just a bit, saying she's having an awful lot of fun.
Throughout her long career, and through all the success, Stacy has always been the same person: a down-to-earth, focused and personable athlete from Auburn, Calif., who made a name for herself in Pocatello, Idaho. She now resides in the San Diego/Chula Vista area with her fianc, discus thrower Ian Waltz (that's EYE-an, not EE-YAN). Through the years, I have hosted more press conferences with Stacy than either of us can count. She always answers any question earnestly and directly, without the canned, media-prepped answers that some of her contemporary, world-famous athletes sometimes exhibited in the past. Through it all, she has always been Stacy.
One of my favorite times with Stacy was at the 2004 Team USA Olympic Training Camp on the Greek island of Crete, where we had the chance to hang out and just chat about the kind of stuff that 30-something, independent-minded women chat about. Not about track, or boys, or parties, or even bills. I couldn't even tell you what we talked about, to tell the truth. It was just two gals having a convo on a beach in Greece.
. . . Of course, you can't write about a meet in Eugene without writing about Nick Symmonds. Totally unoriginal and horribly passe' of me, I know, but I'm told they won't let me board my plane in the morning unless I do it.
Luckily for me, Nick is another favorite o' mine, so it doesn't pain me to write about him. At the 2008 Olympic Trials, the men's 800 was the most talked-about and exciting event of the meet, and the same was true at the 2009 USA Championships. Down the homestretch, it came down to a footrace between local boy Symmonds and wily veteran Khadevis "KD" Robinson (another favorite!), who was running to redeem his fourth-place finish at the Trials.
At the tape, it was Symmonds by a whisker. In this race, you've got to credit the crowd for putting Symmonds over the top, since I know KD wanted the win at least as much, if not more, than Nick. I am very confident in saying that if the Olympics were in Eugene, Nick would be a gold medalist. There is some kind of karmic reaction that happens when he runs in front of these fans, on this track. Kind of like those voice-activated fish you can hang on a wall. Or not.
The way I feel about Nick is the way that many college students feel about some underground garage band who makes it big, and here's why. A week or two before the 2007 Reebok Boston Indoor Games, I was speaking with Barbara Huebner, who was handling PR for the event for Global Athletics & Marketing. Barbara and I were discussing who we should have on a media teleconference prior to the meet, and she said, "How about Nick Symmonds?" My first thought was, "is that a dude from New Zealand?" Once I figured it all out, we had him on the call, where he impressed the heck out of me. A few days later, he won the RBIG. A few weeks after that, I invited him to a pre-event press conference for our 2007 USA Indoor Championships. After he won his first national title at that very same meet, Barbara and I would often joke that we "discovered" him. (It's a joke!)
With Nick, as with Stacy, what you see on the track and in TV interviews is what he is in 'real life': a smart, charming, charismatic kid from a Division III school who loves to run. He's a former hockey-playing, biochemistry-major guy who picked up running somewhere along the line.
Video of Nick is available online, as a star in Nike's, um, revealing commercial for its Nike Free running shoes, "Supernatural." Posting the link might make me liable under certain laws in certain states, but interested fans can Google it.
Some people think Nick gets too much attention for someone who has never finaled at a World Championships or Olympic Games, much less medaled. But here's the deal: he may not have a medal, but he has heart. He has been part of more exciting races on U.S. soil than just about any other athlete. And in those exciting races, he inevitably wins. That is what people love about him.
Plus, he bared his bum for his shoe company.
You can Google it.
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Jill
M. Geer is Chief Public Affairs Officer of USATF. She recently completed her
first marathon at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, where she qualified for
Boston. Follow her professional exploits as the USATF spokesperson and her
adventures as a mid-pack marathoner -- Off The Record.
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