Decathlon Dedication

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/20 ... ecath.html

Decathlon dedication


It's only explanation for those toiling in obscurity 3½ years before Olympics
By Mark Zeigler
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

December 24, 2004

Phil McMullen was in fourth place entering the final event of the decathlon at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials last summer. He needed to beat Paul Terek by 11 seconds in the 1,500 meters to get enough points to pass him for the third and final spot on the 2004 Olympic team.

McMullen beat Terek all right, by nine seconds.

That gave McMullen 8,285 points. Terek had 8,312 and went to Athens. McMullen finished fourth at the Trials for the second straight time.

McMullen is 29 now. He has a wife, two dogs and two cats and, in his words, "on any given morning all of us can be in the same bed." He lives in the Bay Area and scrapes by as an assistant track coach at Cal.

But here he was last weekend at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, at something called the 2004 Decathlon Summit, spending six days with a dozen of the country's top decathletes learning the finer points of throwing a javelin – 3½ years removed from the next Olympic Trials.

Why is he back?

"I don't know," McMullen says. "Stupidity, maybe."

It is the ultimate contradiction in sports. Perhaps no discipline is more revered at the Olympics than the decathlon, the personification of Olympic ideals over two days and 10 events, and yet the protagonists toil in confounding anonymity outside those 48 hours. The quintessential forgotten heroes.

Says Scott Hall, an assistant track coach at Wake Forest University and the coordinator of the Chula Vista training camp: "It takes a special type of personality. You have to be willing to put your time in and train in solitary settings and do it without a lot of publicity."

In the 1990s, American decathletes were largely funded through the benevolence of VISA and its decathlon-obsessed CEO, John Bennett. After Bennett retired and the decathletes got the "we're moving in a different direction" speech from VISA, a group of chiropractors started sponsoring the team in 2002.

That ended last summer. Now the athletes have nothing other than the $11,000 annual budget allocated by a national governing body, USA Track & Field, that Hall estimates spent more than $100,000 on relay camps last year – only to have its women's 4x100-meter team get disqualified in Athens for an illegal baton exchange and the men finish an embarrassing second to an unfancied British team.

So they are survivors, too. They find a way. They get part-time jobs. They train at night. They lean on friends and family.

Kip Janvrin laughs. He turns 40 in July. He's competed in 89 decathlons, more than any other American, over the past 19 years. He's weathered back, elbow, wrist and ankle injuries and two knee surgeries. He's still here.

When he qualified for the 2000 Olympic team at 35, he wore a pink tank top that said "K & K Track Club." That's Ken and Karen, his parents from Panora, Iowa, population 1,175, give or take a few cows.

McMullen had a full-time job as a project manager for a cell phone company in Indianapolis, working from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., then spending four hours on the track at night, "then waking up and doing it all over again." For the 18 months leading to the 2004 Trials in Sacramento, his company continued to pay him while he trained full time.

He raised his best score by 150 points and missed making the Olympic team by 27 – the equivalent of .12 seconds in the 100 meters or an inch in the high jump.

"That dried up," McMullen says of the Indianapolis sponsorship. "Now I don't know."

But something draws him back, some sort of arcane gravity tugs him to Chula Vista to be around the fellows. It is another bizarre dynamic of the decathlon, the notion that the country's best competitors in an individual event regularly and willingly gather to share trade secrets that might one day keep them off an Olympic team.

McMullen arrived in Chula Vista and checked into his dorm room. One of his suitemates was Terek.

"You go to a meet and we're cheering for each other," Janvrin says. "In a regular meet, some guy might pop a big long jump and everybody in the long jump is ticked off because they just lost their position. We know how hard everybody has worked. We know what kind of sacrifice they made.

"Some of my best joys as I get older are seeing someone I competed with when they were younger and not that good, and I helped them out and now they've improved. It makes me feel good to know that I might have had something to do with that."

Janvrin won the decathlon at the Drake Relays in Iowa for nine straight years. He finally lost last April to 25-year-old Travis Geopfert, who grew up in Panora and was mentored by . . . Janvrin.

"We have a pretty close-knit group," says Hall, USA Track and Field's development chairman for the decathlon. "They certainly have respect for each other, because they know what each other goes through."

The German word for decathlon is zehnkampf, which, literally translated, means "fight of 10."

There is the story, now steeped in legend, of the U.S. championships in 1995, when an unseasonable cold front ripped through Sacramento with driving wind and rain that played havoc with the pole vault. Aric Long slipped during the warm-up, crashed into the side of the pit and couldn't feel his legs.

He was hauled off by stretcher and ambulance, needing 14 X-rays on the compressed vertebrae in his back. He also had his severely dislocated left shoulder popped back into place.

Three hours later he walked out of the hospital and caught a ride back to the stadium, where the pole vault was still going on because the swirling winds forced meet officials to keep switching the direction of the pit. Long cleared 15 feet, 5 inches and went on to finish ninth overall.

Or there's the 2004 Trials, when Ryan Harlan came down with a staph infection in his right leg that required hospitalization for the two days preceding the decathlon. He checked out of the hospital the next morning and, curious, someone asked him where he was going.

To the stadium, Harlan replied.

"I figured if I could walk, then I could jog, and if I could jog, then I could run," Harlan explained at the time. "And if I could run? Then maybe I could do a decathlon."

He finished 14th and returned to the hospital.

Or there's the general hassle of an event that requires two days to complete. Only a handful are staged each year, and not necessarily in the most convenient locales – Des Moines, Iowa, and Talence, France, are two regular spots.

Janvrin packs the following for a meet: three to five poles, two discuses, a shot, two javelins, eight pairs of event-specific shoes, a few sets of uniforms and warm-up suits, rain gear, an umbrella and a chair. (Whenever possible, he drives.)

Terek is still missing his poles from the Athens Olympics. At the 2000 Games in Sydney, one of Janvrin's poles arrived broken. He had another sent from the States; it showed up broken, too.

Broken poles, yes. Broken spirits, never.

Janvrin said he was retiring after the Olympic Trials last July. But there he was in Chula Vista last week, doing hill workouts in 80-degree heat with a 39-year-old body. And there was McMullen, shirt off, his skin glistening with sweat, his face contorted in a mix of agony and focus, refining his hurdling technique.

"I wish I played baseball or something where I could (afford to) retire," McMullen says. "But it's not that way. I chose a different path. And it's still fun. What do they say? Money doesn't buy happiness."

[theflyingkorean]

That is quite an inspiding story of people who are VERY dedicated.

[skyshark177]

Very good article

[vaulter0512]

Great article!!

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.cadillacnews.com/articles/20 ... orts01.txt


McMullen still going at it
By Marc Vieau, Cadillac News
The disappointment Phil McMullen has tasted in the last four years might have broken a lot of people.

In 2000, McMullen missed qualifying for the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia by the slimmest of margins, taking fourth at the trials.

In 2004, McMullen missed qualifying for the Summer Olympics in Athens by just 16 points after again taking fourth at the trials.

Yet, each day the world-class decathlete and Cadillac native still gets out of bed, goes to one of his jobs as an assistant coach at the University of California-Berkeley and also keeps training in the decathlon.


McMullen, now 30, and residing in El Sobrante, Calif., with his wife Traci, still has his dreams and goals ahead of him.

On the immediate horizon is the United States Track and Field Outdoor Championships this week in Carson, Calif., just south of Los Angeles.

Up for grabs are three spots on the U.S. decathlon team for the IAAF World Championships, to be held in August in Helsinki, Finland.

McMullen has come a long way in getting over the major disappointment of just missing out on the Athens Olympics.

"For awhile, I had a tough time swallowing it. I walked into that meet, though, and performed the best I ever had in my life," McMullen said.

"It's athletics, you know. If you know you gave it everything you had, you can take it. I was super disappointed, but life goes on. You have to pick yourself up and go on. It was a big deal for me to keep training, but I did it with a lot of people around the (Cal) track program that still believe in me. That was important."

His therapy excelled a little bit earlier this year when he took first overall in a pretty big decathlon at a "Multistars" event in Salo, Italy. His score of 8,107 points gave him the top American score to date entering the U.S. Championships.

"I opened up the season a little earlier than I normally do and I didn't do Indoor Nationals," McMullen said. "I scored the 8,107 despite some pretty strong head winds and there were some strong people there."

Since then, it's been here, there and everywhere for McMullen.

"It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks lately," he said. "We had the Pac-10 Championships in Los Angeles, then I was recruiting for the pole vault in Sacramento, then we were in Eugene, Ore. I've put a lot of emphasis on the kids lately instead of my training."

But now it's back to his preparations for the decathlon in Carson, a meet where the competition is strong for those three spots to go to Helsinki.

"I am going in healthy Å  that's the big thing," McMullen said.

"The top contenders are myself, Bryan Clay will be there, the NCAA champion Jon Harlan will be there and so will Paul Terek. It will be a dogfight for the top three spots. I feel confident, though, that things are going in the right direction and I am pretty confident I am going to make this team. I had a little bit of back problem that slowed me down after Italy, but I had some good workouts this week and I am fairly healthy."

The decathlon starts at 4 p.m. today with the 100-meter dash, followed by the long jump, shot put, high jump and 400 to wrap up the first day. The second day begins with the 110 hurdles at 4 p.m., followed by the discus, pole vault, javelin and 1500-meter run to wrap things up.

For McMullen, the score is not the important thing in Carson, but to do his best and let the numbers add up.

"At my age, I am one of the veterans now," he said.

"I am looking to come in and produce solid marks. That would put me in the high 8,100s. I am thinking around 8,100 or 8,200 should make the Helsinki team. You just look to execute each event to the best of your ability and the numbers will add up."