One day in 2007, Anwar Moore ran the 110-meter hurdles faster than anyone else in the world had that year. On Saturday, he won his heat to qualify for the semifinals of the event at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. On Sunday afternoon, he qualified for the finals. And, two hours later, he was in third place with just two hurdles separating him from Beijing and the Olympics for which he has trained much of his life.
Then, his foot caught a hurdle and he tripped, fell to the track surface and watched his Olympic dreams pass him by.
Minutes later, he stood just outside the media tent, preparing to enter the narrow mix-zone lane where athletes walk by and answer questions posed by reporters stationed behind metal barriers. Sweat beading on his scalp, Moore leaned on one of those barriers and gazed at the athletes' warm-up area, trying to compose himself before facing the questions. After five to 10 minutes, he finally began the long walk through the mix zone.Bernard Lagat will represent the United States in the 5,000- and 1,500-meter races in Beijing.
"I can't put my feelings into words," he began. "I think I overexaggerated my trailing leg and I think the wind was just pushing too hard or whatever and I just got out of position real bad and I fell."
You trained your whole life to get this opportunity, a reporter said, and you fell 10 meters short of the Olympics.
"Yeah, it's a tremendous disappointment to me," Moore said. "I guess God has something different for me in store. And I hope it's..."
He stopped speaking and turned his head. And then, this very fast, very strong, 29-year-old man began to cry. Choking back the tears, he apologized, saying he couldn't speak. He walked away slowly, passing a 42-inch video screen at the exact moment it showed Lolo Jones leaping and dancing and twisting after winning the women's hurdles to earn a spot on the U.S. Olympic team Moore so desperately wanted to make. And, as Jones celebrated, Moore continued the longest, slowest and most painful walk of his life.
The Nike slogan adorning everything from the billboard outside the city to the buses patrolling the streets reads: "Welcome to Track Town, U.S.A. Home of the Hardest Team to Make." Indeed, the standards are unforgiving. Finish in the top three or go home to begin training for the next Olympics.
"The Olympics are always less stressful than the trials," high jumper Amy Acuff said. "The Olympics trials, there's really nothing to gain, only to lose. The whole mandate of having to finish in the top three is all I've been thinking about and I couldn't think past that at all. It's all I could think about and when I learned I made the team, I just lost my mind and then lost my composure for jumping. Just get in the top three, that is all."
And Beijing, mind you, will be Acuff's fourth Olympics.
You can argue, and argue persuasively, the system does not necessarily send the country's best athletes to the Olympics, that exceptions should be allowed for injuries. That argument rings especially true in the case of Tyson Gay, who is the reigning world champion in the 200, but did not qualify after suffering a slight hamstring strain during a heat Saturday. But you can also argue the system is the best one possible because it requires that athletes perform at their peak under the same exacting conditions as the Olympics themselves.
As Gay's coach, Jon Drummond, said, "That's why they're called the Olympic trials."
You'll certainly get no argument from Wallace Spearman. He finished third in the 200 Sunday, four-hundredths of a second behind Walter Dix and 2004 gold medalist Shaun Crawford. Had Gay been able to run, those four-hundredths of a second -- an almost imperceptible amount of time -- might have been enough to keep Spearman off the team."When Tyson got hurt, it opened an opportunity for someone else to make the team," Spearman said. "I got third, so I guess the question will be if he was here, would I have made the team. I can't answer that question. I'm here. That's all I can say."
The system certainly adds to the drama and tension.
The trials began two Fridays ago, and every day, 20,000-some fans packed a track that only had seats for three-quarters of them and saw something extraordinary happen. There was the 100-meter dash, when Gay ran the distance faster than any human ever had. There was the men's 800, when Oregon runners finished 1-2-3 and sent the Hayward Field crowd into such a frenzy the runners couldn't hear themselves breathe. There was the women's 1,500 semifinals, when 16-year-old Jordan Hasay postponed a flight to Poland for the world junior championships, then picked off runner after runner on the final stretch to advance to the finals (she finished 10th).
"I learned a lot of things," she said. "I learned that I can come out and compete and not be intimidated. At the same time, I learned that I still have a lot of work to do to be up there and perform consistently at this level."
And then, there were the final two events on the Fourth of July, races that drove home the unforgiving nature of the trials.
About 10 minutes after nine o'clock, Kara Goucher crossed the finish line one second ahead of her nearest competitor to win the women's 5,000 and earn a spot on the Olympic team. It was the crowning moment of her athletic career. But she could not savor this accomplishment for long. That's because as she slapped hands and accepted congratulations during a victory line, her husband, Adam, was running in the men's 10,000 meters. As she anxiously watched, Adam fell farther and farther behind leader Abdi Abdirahman and eventually finished seventh.
Gee, honey, that's great about you making the Olympics. But if you'll forgive me, I'll pass on the champagne for now.
"I was really, really happy until about 10 minutes ago," Kara said during the press conference, holding back tears.
Before the trials, several of the athletes said the only way for them to overcome the focus on the doping scandals was through their own performances. If those scandals have turned you off track and field, if you can't take your focus off all that is good about the sport, well, then you're missing out. Because there are some extraordinary Americans going to Beijing.
Athletes such as shot-putter Reese Hoffa, a 285-pound former orphan who can solve a Rubik's Cube in less than a minute, juggles knives and talks of competing one day in a gorilla suit; Chaunte Howard, who won the high jump less than a year after giving birth to her daughter, Jasmine; Anthony Famiglietti, the bearded runner who talked about channeling Steve Prefontaine after winning the steeplechase; and the three qualifiers in the 1,500 -- Kenyan-born Bernard Lagat, Mexican immigrant Leonel Manzano and Lopez Lomong, a former Lost Boy of Sudan who lived in a refugee camp for a decade before coming to America. If there was a better trio to represent what America is all about on this Fourth of July weekend, I'd like to see it.
"I told the crowd, 'Thank you, America,'" said Lomong, who became a U.S. citizen last year. "Because that was my dream and it finally came true."
Then again, maybe a better representative of all things American is Jones, who grew up in Iowa and is of French, African-American, Native American and Norwegian descent. She said she never won any event as a junior, but Sunday she raced her way to a spot on the Olympic team and was so excited she said she was even looking forward to the blood test.
See you in Beijing. And, if not there, then there is always London in four years. Perhaps that is what God has in mind for Moore.
He'll be 33 by then, very old for a hurdler and four years older than the oldest qualifier in his event Sunday. But you never know. Look at Jeff Hartwig. He qualified for the Olympics in the pole vault here. And he's 41.
"If you keep working hard, you can achieve your dreams. You can still have success," Jones said. "Winning all the time is not important. It's staying in the game."