yesYou're a basketball player who grew up in America. You tell everyone your dream is to make it to the NBA. Plain and simple.
It's unlikely. But the NBA holds a draft every year, which this year begins on June 26th. The league welcomes about 60 new players to its teams. Of course, the drafted players need to make the team's roster and earn playing time to be able to say they've truly achieved their dream. And American players have to compete with international talent for positions. These players seem to get better every year.
However, if a player is not drafted, he or she can enter the league as a free agent, either immediately or after playing overseas or in the minor leagues. During this past NBA season, 572 players played at least one NBA game.
Meanwhile, you're a 100-meter sprinter who grew up in the U.S. You tell everyone your dream is to compete in the Olympics. Planned and simple.
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But the process of qualifying for the U.S. Olympic track and field team is as intense as it gets, and it's worth repeating every four years. Every four years –Three 100m sprinters will be selected to the U.S. Olympic Team in the individual Olympic events. There is no 60-round draft at the Olympics.
Plus, the U.S. is holding trials to choose its Olympic team. The track and field trials began Friday in Eugene, Oregon, and will run through June 30. It doesn't matter if you're the reigning world champion, have been setting records all season, or are just feeling a bit under the weather on the morning of the race: If you don't finish in the top three, your dreams are postponed, if not totally dashed.
“The math of dreams is unfair,” said U.S. hurdler Christy Kaslin, who won the bronze medal in the 100 meters at the 2016 Rio Olympics. “That's why you have to work hard every day, with blood, sweat and tears. If you make it to the Olympic trials, it's like you've won. hunger game.”
This week and next, the four most-watched Olympic sports — diving, swimming, gymnastics and track and field — will hold their quadrennial trials. “I've been talking to friends in other sports about it, and they're like, 'That's crazy,'” reigning world silver medalist and U.S. heptathlete Anna Hall says of the trials system. In diving, athletes will compete for places in Knoxville, Tennessee, through June 23. At the swimming trials, which will also run through June 23 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the math is even tougher. In most sports, at most, the top two athletes qualify for the Olympics.
The U.S. Gymnastics Trials begin in Minneapolis on June 27. Only five women and five men will be allowed to compete.
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Talk about pressure. “It's a mental battle,” says Kathryn, who missed out on making the finals at the 2012 Trials. “Physically, we're all on the same level. It's the time it takes to walk from the warm-up track to the stage under the stadium, to step outside and hear the starting gun, and that's when the race is won or lost.”
In 2016, between her semifinals and finals in Eugene, Kaslin turned to fashion to stay positive. “The first thing I did was change my clothes,” she said, calling her final outfit a “Beyoncé” uniform. “Everyone's going to see me wearing this on Hollywood Boulevard.” Feeling more confident in her look, Kaslin started to visualize the final. Winning her first and semifinal matches helped. “I felt good. I wasn't having any negative thoughts in my mind,” she said. Kaslin finished second and booked a ticket to Rio.
Track and field is built on tension. As the runners line up at the starting line, a packed stadium goes silent in the seconds before the gun goes off. That moment builds excitement for fans, but it can easily lead athletes to fall into counterproductive thinking. “We forget that in these types of sports, the body is under so much tension,” says sports psychologist Shane McGowan. “And that's what kills us.” Athletes need to find a way to stay calm, he says. “Relax, get your breathing under control, get to the starting line, look down the line and think, 'This is mine.'”
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American Justin Gatlin, the 2004 Athens Olympic 100m gold medalist, has competed in four Olympic trials. He made the team in 2004, 2012 and 2016, but missed the Tokyo Games three years ago after aggravating an injury in the 100m trials final. (In 2008, after serving a doping suspension, he won a bronze medal in London and a silver medal behind Usain Bolt in Rio.) Gatlin, who now hosts an athletics-themed podcast, practiced for the Olympic trials before actually competing in them. “I'd take some training partners and put myself in a scenario where I'd say, 'Oh, in my mind, you're Tyson Gay,'” Gatlin says. “In my mind, you're someone else who's running fast at that point, and I'd think about how I'm going to compete against them in the final.”
In a trial, you control the variables you can control, he said in a popular 2020 ESPN documentary. Last Dance, Michael Jordan's camp floated the theory that Utah Jazz fans tampered with pizza delivered to his Park City hotel room before Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals. In the now-legendary “Flu Game,” Jordan was sick but still scored 38 points to lead Chicago to the win. “I had food poisoning,” Jordan said.
Though a Utah man who claimed to have made the pizza came forward and denied contamination (and said he's actually a Bulls fan), Gatlin says the points still apply: Buy food from trusted sources, and stay away from public places where you might catch an infectious disease as much as possible.
“When you go to Oregon, there's a lot of trees,” Gatlin says of the track trial, “so there's going to be a lot of pollen. Bring Claritin, Zyrtec, whatever you want.”
After all, every sniffle costs a millisecond and potentially an Olympic berth.
Sometimes, there's just nothing you can do. Alicia Montaño went into the 2016 Olympic Trials as a favorite to make the U.S. Olympic team for the second straight year. But as she prepared for her final charge with about 75 meters to go in the 800-meter final, she accidentally collided with another athlete and fell to the ground, completely erasing her chances.
She didn't do anything to deserve to lose, but there are no do-overs in court.
“I think it still hurts sometimes,” Montaño said. She finished fifth in London, but 12 years later her medal was reallocated to bronze after a second Russian athlete who finished ahead of her was stripped of hers. Russian track and field athletes were banned from the Rio Olympics, so it was Montaño's last chance at a true podium.
But she found a way to cope: she published a book. Feel good fitnessin 2020. She has also focused her advocacy efforts on female athletes. Montaño, who competed in the U.S. National Championships while eight months pregnant in 2014, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in 2019. Times She criticized Nike's sponsorship policy for pregnant athletes. After a public outcry, Nike expanded its protections. “I focused my energy on doing what I'm really good at, which isn't just running,” Montaño says.
And despite all the stress, most Olympians would say the pursuit was worth it. “The Olympic Trials changed my life,” says Kathryn. “It gave me the fortitude and drive to keep striving to achieve history. It prepared me for life after sports.”
Those who don't qualify (and in fact, the vast majority) shouldn't feel ashamed. “There will come a day when you can sit down with your colleagues, friends and family and talk about the experience and say, 'Yes, I made it to the Olympic Trials,'” Kathryn says. “Not many people can say that. Just going there and competing is an accomplishment that everyone should be proud of, because the USA is the hardest team to make.”
True, but there will be little solace in the coming days for the team that placed fourth in Eugene.
