Track meets are a low-key three-ring circus. With two or three events happening simultaneously, they’re always yielding moments of serendipitous amazement for the casual fan.
It was like that a couple of weeks ago at the Texas Relays here in Austin, at Mike A. Myers Track & Soccer Stadium. Late on the fourth day of competition, most people in the stands were waiting for the men’s mile and the men’s 4×400-meter relay. In the mile, we’d get to see Leo Manzano, the Longhorn senior, NCAA champion, and likely member of the U.S. Olympic team. In interviews, Manzano says absolutely nothing interesting. Fortunately, he makes up for that on the track, where he is a fiery racer (he ran a 3 minute, 56 second mile). In the relay, there would be 36 guys running the four legs but only one of serious interest – 2004 Olympic gold medalist Jeremy Wariner, from Waco. With the wraparound sunglasses, Wariner has an appealingly cocky aura, but the thing that leaves you agog is mostly this: He’s white, and white guys aren’t supposed to run this fast.
Anyway, interviewing some runner while waiting for those races, I glanced over at the track a lap into the high school girls’ 1,600-meter run. And then I did a genuine double take. Mind you, it was early in the race. You expect to see the runners in a tight clutch, and they were. All except Chelsey Sveinsson, already 20 yards ahead of the pack.
I’m afraid I didn’t politely excuse myself from the interview. I just walked away from the dude, mouth agape, mesmerized by a 15-year-old kid, competing for the Greenhill School, in Addison. It wasn’t just that she was winning so decisively, though that was part of it, especially with the PA announcer exhorting the crowd to cheer her on to a meet record. It was the way she ran that took your breath away.
It was just so beautiful.
A race is a work of art, the great American distance runner Steve Prefontaine used to say, and that’s what this was: an aesthetic experience of the very highest order. You felt transported. You felt changed. You felt that you were given a privileged glimpse into your own possibilities.
“I was like, ‘ahhhhhhh!'” Sveinsson tells me afterward, describing the high of posting a time of 4:44. “I was like, ‘Okay, it’s the last lap; I’m not going to miss the meet record by 0.2 seconds or whatever – I’m going to break it now.’ And I did!”
That “ahhhhhhh” seems to be Sveinsson‘s all-purpose expression for what it feels like to be Chelsey Sveinsson, chasing down Olympic dreams.
“Just the way she moves, the way she carries herself, she’s just in a different place than other high school runners,” says her coach, Mike Krueger, admitting he can’t take the credit for that. “If you wanted to design an Olympic miler, this is what you would come up with.”
Chelsey Sveinsson. Remember that name. You heard it here first.
This article appears in April 18 • 2008.