Suite dreams...Olympic training center Chula Vista

[old vaulter]

http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st ... K224913600

By Mark Zeigler
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

June 27, 2008

CHULA VISTA – Mike Hazle was surrendering.
“I was kind of at the end of my rope,” he says.



BRUCE K. HUFF / Union-Tribune
Javelin thrower Mike Hazle (left) and high jumper Tora Harris live in the Olympic Training Center dorms in Chula Vista.
It was October 2006, and on an ordinary morning a few weeks earlier he had arrived at Velocity Sports Performance in Lawrenceville, Ga., where he worked as a personal trainer and where he worked out trying to make the 2008 U.S. Olympic team in the javelin. He punched in his security code. It didn't work.

In the years since college, Hazle had slept in guest rooms, slept on roll-away beds, slept on couches, slept on floors, slept “wherever there is 6 feet of space.” He bounced around from Texas to West Virginia to Finland to Georgia. He accumulated $60,000 in credit card debt. Now Velocity Sports Performance was shutting down.

“Lost my job and my training facility all in one day,” Hazle says. “So it was a pretty tough day.”

His college roommate was a manager at a pharmaceutical company and always said to give him a call if wanted a real job, if he wanted to trade track spikes for loafers, if he finally got tired of the lonesome hours hurling a carbon fiber spear across a field and walking after it. Hazle made the call.

He also called U.S. track and field officials about the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, where he could live and eat and train for free, and issued a threat: “If you don't let me in, I'm done.”



AdvertisementFor three years he had tried to gain admittance to the resident-athlete program at the 155-acre complex on a bluff above Lower Otay Reservoir, but the general rule is you must meet the Olympic “A” qualification standard in your event. Hazle was 23½ inches short.
“I'm not kidding,” Hazle says. “I was 24 hours from taking a pharmaceutical sales job in North Dallas.”

The training center called back. It would admit Hazle on a provisional basis. There was a bed available in Suite 315.


Suite 315 is on the first floor in the training center's 138-bed dormitory complex.

In the 10-by-10-foot bedroom on the left lives Toby Stevenson, a silver medalist in the pole vault from the 2004 Olympics. He's 31 and has an economics degree from Stanford.

In the 10-by-10 bedroom on the right is Tora Harris, a high jumper who made the 2004 Olympic team but did not medal. He's 29 and has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton.

Hazle lives in the middle, in what normally is the common area. He is 29 and has a master's degree in sports management from Texas State. A flat-screen TV occupies most of his desk. His closet is a rack with hangers and a blue curtain around it.

“He likes the room 95 degrees, and I like it 65,” Hazle says, motioning toward Harris' bedroom. “He's got stuff everywhere. I'm a neat freak. If you're 29, 30, 31, you want to start piecing your life together and having some things you call your own, and you're living with two other guys in tiny rooms. You've got no privacy.”

Which raises the obvious question, because you figure all three could find six-figure jobs and live in big houses:

Why?

“For most of us, there's a certain need to be accomplished at something, to be good,” says Hazle, who stumbled upon the javelin after football and baseball careers didn't pan out. “I feel the need to compete and defeat people. I feel the need to kick some (rear), and I don't think you can get that same gratification, that same rush, in the business world putting in a 9-to-5 shift.

“I think you can realize some success in your own way, but not like we can.”

The U.S. Olympic Trials in track and field begin today at legendary Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., a highly democratic and highly merciless selection process. Stevenson's silver medal? Harris' Olympic experience? They don't count.

In most individual events, you must finish in the top three at the trials to go to China. Fourth place gets you a seat in front of your TV in August.

“That's all people care about in this country, the Olympics,” Hazle says. “It's the first question people ask when I tell them I compete in (track and field). They always say, 'Have you been to the Olympics?' It's almost like a rite of passage.

“You can be a world record-holder and have never lost a race, but if you don't make the Olympic team, you're considered a failure to a certain extent.”

What wall and ceiling space Hazle has is covered with posters from foreign meets in which he has competed. He works part time at nightclubs as a deejay under the handle “Saint Misha,” and a turntable sits next to the television. He's got a couple of hanging plants. His bed is raised off the floor so he can store clothes under it.

There's about 3 feet of open space between the bed and his desk.

But the cafeteria is just a short walk away. So is the weight room. So are sports science and sports medicine facilities. Behind the cafeteria is a world-class throwing area and a 400-meter track.

Since moving into Suite 315 on Nov. 1, 2006 – Hazle remembers the exact day – he has improved his personal best by a full 10 feet, to 269-8. It's above the Olympic “A” qualifying standard and ranks No. 2 nationally this year.

“Basically in a nutshell,” Hazle says, “this place saves our (rears) because we don't have any bills. This place levels the playing field against the Europeans, because they get direct funding from their government to train.

“Sure, I'm living with a slob. But I'm living for free.”


Hazle says the right bedroom in Suite 315 “looks like a science experiment.”

There is floor-to-ceiling metal shelving on two walls, and the shelves are full of . . . stuff. Shoes. Clothes. Hard drives. Monitors. Video cameras. Electronic parts. A bed, allegedly, is somewhere behind it all.

“I'm functionally neat, you know what I'm saying?” Harris says. “I can put something somewhere and it looks neat, but I need four minutes to find it. Now let's say you throw everything everywhere and it's easy to find things, but people call you messy. I try to be more efficient.

“It's set up like a warehouse. You've got a 10-by-10 space. You have to maximize it. If you look at a company's warehouse, they have limited space and they need to get to their products as quickly as they can, because time is money. That's what my room is like to me.”

So what is a high jumper doing with 10 hard drives, four computer screens and a high-definition video camera in his dorm room?

There is a method to his madness. Harris films every practice session, with cameras placed in the exact same location so they always capture the same angles. He films in high definition because, to his way of thinking, the technology is available and why not?

He edits the footage and once a week e-mails clips to coach Frans Bosch. In the Netherlands.

Harris also has a video library of maybe 50 high jumpers from around the world, men and women, and he examines their techniques religiously, hoping to pick up a tip here or there. He figured it would help to view two separate videos synchronized side by side, so he's writing his own software.

“Basic scripts,” he says. “It's pretty easy.”

Harris has been at the training center since 2005. He is the son of an African-American serviceman and a Taiwanese woman, and he speaks fluent Mandarin. His girlfriend is Gao Shuying, a pole vaulter from China who trains at the Chula Vista center.

Harris was a football player at Princeton, an outside linebacker, but got hurt in his first practice and dropped the sport the following year to concentrate on track and field. His top jump of 7-7¾ came when he won the 2006 U.S. Championships. At the 2004 trials he tied for third at 7-5¼ with two other jumpers, earning the final spot on the Olympic team based on fewer previous misses.

“If I had a twin and he just went by how he felt in practice, and I used all this (technological) stuff, I think it would make about 2 centimeters (three-quarters of an inch) of difference,” Harris says with a conviction that indicates he has spent long nights crunching the numbers. “Two centimeters total over a career.

“But that might be the difference between the gold and silver medal. That's how crazy this sport is.”


On the wall in the left bedroom of Suite 315 is a glassed frame with a dead laurel wreath inside. It is what medalists wore on the podium in Athens, just as in ancient times.

“It's from the oldest grove of olive trees in Greece,” Stevenson says. “The leaves were specially picked for the Olympics.”

Stevenson came home and figured life as a pole vaulter would get easier, because he was a pole vaulter with a silver medal.

“The only (vaulter) who wears a helmet, pretty crazy dude, dances in the pit, I got pretty well known,” Stevenson says. “And I didn't get touched, except from a car dealership in my hometown of Odessa (Texas). Nobody else stepped up.

“If I was in any other country, I would have my own sports drink. It would be a million-dollar medal.”

He pauses.

“But that's OK.”

So he's back at the training center, at age 31, chasing the best medal – living in a 10-by-10 dorm room, eating in a cafeteria, taking his laptop across the hall to Harris every time it crashes, and hoping he pops a big vault in Eugene in tonight's prelims and Sunday's final.

“Imagine four years of your life coming down to one track meet,” Stevenson says. “There is pressure in every job out there, but I wouldn't know how to relate what we go through. Imagine your entire job coming down to one day. That's pressure that most human beings will never face.”

Stevenson lifts his arm. On the inside of his biceps is a tattoo of the Olympic rings, with a laurel wreath in place of the middle ring. Stevenson has classmates from Stanford who run big companies, who are worth tens of millions of dollars, who live in big houses and drive fancy cars and take exotic vacations. He has a tattoo on his right arm.

“We have this thing we do,” Stevenson says. “We'll all be on our hands and knees out at the track, literally crawling after a really hard workout, ready to vomit. And then one of us will say: 'Yeah, but it's better than an office job.'

“And suddenly we all start to feel better.”



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