(Editor’s note: Split seconds or a small misstep during the Olympics can alter an athlete’s career, legacy and earning potential. The Associated Press spoke with athletes about how they prepare to avoid these disappointments and the impact of these life-changing finals.)
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Mike Conley spent most of the 1980s ranked among the best triple jumpers in the world. Therefore, before the 1988 US Olympic trials, little thought was given to the idea that he would not finish in the top three and travel to Seoul.
In a sport set in an Olympic world, where gold medals can be won and careers can be built in the tiniest fractions – of seconds, inches or centimeters – what dashed Conley’s hopes had nothing to do with a tape measure.
It was a pair of baggy shorts, the kind he had never worn in a running competition before, that left him impressed. Conley remembers video replays that showed the breeze blowing through the ventilated flaps on the sides of his shorts created a barely noticeable mark in the sand, nearly a foot behind where he landed.
Officials measured Conley’s jump from the mark made by his shorts. It cost him precious centimeters and he finished fourth, one place short of the Olympics.
“Devastating,” the father of Timberwolves guard Mike Conley Jr., now 61, called it. “I wasn’t jumping bad. I was in a good place then. I made all the right physical decisions. But I made some stupid mental mistakes.”
Conley’s story serves as one of hundreds of examples of how the smallest details can change not only the outcome of a single race or contest, but can also have a huge impact on the lives of athletes whose defining moments – their shot at a box of Wheaties or a six-figure endorsement – come just once every four years, or sometimes just once in a lifetime.
More than 17 days in Paris this summerfractions – often won or lost due to the smallest details that often only the athletes and their coaches can perceive – will make the difference between first, second, third – or no medal.
Conley’s story had a storybook ending. Motivated by failure, not to mention the silver medal at the 1984 Games, where he was favorite, he returned in 1992 and won Olympic gold in Barcelona.
“I always say that experience is gained through poor judgment,” said Conley, who now serves as president of high performance for USA Track and Field. “And in ’92, I put it all together and won gold.”
Not everyone gets that second chance. Those who spend years reviewing what happened and reshaping their training and mindset to ensure the faction doesn’t beat them again.
Rower Michelle Sechser finished fifth with Molly Reckford at the 2021 Tokyo Games, in a race where the top five were squeezed out by less than a second. Sechser says she uses this agonizing loss as fuel for a return trip to the Olympics this year.
“I visualize that moment,” she said, recounting the story with tears in her eyes. “Even saying that now makes me emotional thinking about what that moment on the podium would be like. And it’s enough to carry me forward.”
Most Olympic athletes know what they’re signing up for when they commit to a life where their sport takes center stage once every four years.
Of course, all these sprinters, rowers and BMX cyclists continue to work hard in non-Olympic years, with world and national championships and regular stops on their individual sporting circuits keeping them in good shape. But there is only one Olympics and they know it.
“There’s a lot of money at stake when you’re competing in the Olympics,” said Nevin Harrison, a canoeing gold medalist three years ago in Tokyo. “If I come first versus fourth in this race, which is a matter of 0.3 seconds, that will determine which apartment I live in next year.
“It’s added pressure,” she said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, people are going to be really excited and not disappointed.’ It’s more like, ‘Do I pay my bills or not?’”
Says long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall, who comes into the Olympics undefeated in seven matches this year: “I’m a goal-oriented person, which is cool, but at the same time it’s almost degrading to us. Where it’s, like, an inch. Like, what could I have done to get that inch? I could have eaten right, I could have slept right, it could have been nothing. I don’t know.”
In 2008, American gymnast Jonathan Horton performed what he called the best high bar routine of his life in event finals at the Olympics. This earned him a silver medal in a narrow, 0.025-point loss to Zou Kai of China. A small step in disassembly was the difference between the first and second.
He is at peace with the outcome, but well aware of what that small step cost him.
“That 0.025 was the difference between a seven-figure paycheck for me, what I heard from people is what I could have gotten for a big sponsorship deal with a gold medal,” said Horton, who is 38 and works in insurance sales in Texas.
A blink takes an average of 0.1 second – a tenth of a second.
Two of the biggest races of 100-meter sprinter Justin Gatlin’s life were decided by 0.01 seconds – one-hundredth of a second.
The American sprinter Colorful and sometimes controversial career took off in 2004 – before Usain Bolt became a household name – thanks to a 0.01-second victory over Portugal’s Francis Obikwelu at the Athens Olympics.
In replays of the race, you can see Gatlin raising his fists in perfect form, before starting to lean forward in the final stages – his chest breaking the plane of the finish line in Lane 3, just a split second before Obikwelu crossed. in Track 5. Gatlin ran the 100 meters in 9.85 seconds.
“For me, it was a life-changing event,” said Gatlin, now 42, who estimated that the gold medal earned him several million dollars more than if he had finished second. “As you train, prepare, and strategize, you need to make sure you’re realizing that those hundredths of a second, something that’s faster than the snap of a finger, can really change the trajectory of your career as well as your life. legacy.”
More than a decade later, in 2015, Gatlin was closer to the end of his career and Bolt was a six-time Olympic gold medalist when they met at the world championships, in a race that would dictate the conversation leading up to the following year’s Olympic Games.
Gatlin put together a run of sub-9.8 100s en route to the championship at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. Bolt was suffering from injuries. Gatlin, perhaps for the first time since Bolt arrived on the scene, felt like one of the favorites.
Gatlin led midway through the race. (That wasn’t all that unusual against Bolt, who started slowly.) But with the finish line some 20 meters away, the American’s steps became erratic. He began to lean forward, and when he reached the finish line, he was off balance, with his arms flailing, while Bolt was still in perfect shape, crossing the finish line. The result: Bolt 9.79 seconds, Gatlin 9.80.
Most experts called Bolt’s race brilliant. Gatlin cried in the car the entire way back to the hotel, certain he had given it away.
The difference in that race, he said: “Was the fact that I didn’t focus on my race, I focused on competing with him.”
Conley never wore those baggy shorts again. Before one of his critical jumps at the 1992 Barcelona Games, he stood near the start of the track with tears streaming down his face.
It was the culmination of eight years of disappointment and the chance he had to make it all right.
“I cried and said to myself, ‘I’m about to win the Olympics,’” Conley said. “I was picked to win gold in 1984, I was picked to win it in 1988 and now it’s 1992,” he said. “I trained every day, 365 days a year for this moment, and I had to do it for eight years to get there. There’s been a lot of development to this.”
Gatlin also ended his career on a high note. Two years after that heartbreaking loss to Bolt at the world championships, which led to a 0.08-second loss at the Rio Olympics, Gatlin caused an upset in what turned out to be Bolt’s final 100-meter race – at the Worlds in London.
Bolt finished third that night and Gatlin beat his American teammate, Christian Coleman, by 0.02 seconds.
In total, Gatlin finished first or second in seven 100-meter races at World Championships and Olympics between 2004 and 2019. The cumulative margin between first and second place in all of those races: 0.1 second – one-tenth of a second.
He, like anyone else, knows exactly how these small fractions that separate first and second place in Paris can impact the lives of so many Olympic athletes.
“People will congratulate you for winning silver,” Gatlin said, “but they love the people who win.”
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This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
