2016 U.S. Olympic Team Trials

Toni Reavis: Heroes Need to Be Seen

Toni Reavis: Heroes Need to Be Seen

By Toni ReavisInteresting. This week Caitlyn Jenner graces the cover of Sports Illustrated as part of an excellent feature reported and written by Tim Layde

Jun 30, 2016 by Taylor Dutch
Toni Reavis: Heroes Need to Be Seen
By Toni Reavis

Interesting. This week Caitlyn Jenner graces the cover of Sports Illustrated as part of an excellent feature reported and written by Tim Layden. It is the kind of long-form journalism which made SI rightly famous, and that ought to earn Tim some nods in the year-end Best Of compilations and at mag award galas.  I recommend it very highly.


Bruce Jenner Wins Gold Medal
August 9, 1976 (credit: Walter Iooss Jr.)
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Interesting, too, that this is the second SI cover featuring Jenner, though the first as Caitlyn. Back on August 9, 1976 we saw the strapping Bruce Jenner in the final stride of his Olympic gold medal win at the Montreal Olympic decathlon on the SI cover.  Obviously, the focus of this week’s story isn’t about sport, instead Layden distills Jenner’s life-long struggle with gender dysphoria, even as she trained her then male body to Olympic decathlon heights and distances and speeds rarely reached even in the ensuing 40 years.

But there was one other notable thing about this week’s SI issue in that it represents only the fourth SI cover pic featuring a track athlete, or in this case an ex-track athlete, since 1996.  I am old enough to have been around since the beginning of Sports Illustrated, and was fortunate enough to have an uncle who gave me a subscription as an annual Christmas present when I was a boy.


Sir Roger Bannister, Jan. 1955, SI's first Sportsman of The Year
But it was while I was preparing an address I was to present at the Global Athletics Conference in Durbin, South Africa in November of 2014 that I discovered that in the first 50 years of Sports Illustrated (1954-2004) the sport of track & field had graced the cover of the national sporting mag 99 times. And seven of those covers featured track stars who had been named Sportsman of The Year, beginning in January 1955 when Roger Bannister, history’s first sub-4:00 miler, was honored as the magazine’s inaugural year top sportsman.

nullBut since October 2, 2000 when Marion Jones was featured as the cover-girl after her then-husband C.J. Hunter had been popped for drugs at the Sydney Olympics, only Jamaican Usain Bolt has found himself on the SI cover (until Caitlyn), once in 2009 for his performances in Berlin at the IAAF World Championships, and the other for his work at the 2012 London Olympics. From an average of two covers per year for 50 years, the sport had only been featured three times in 16 years.


Bolt in London 2012
As the sport gathers this week in Eugene, Oregon for the highly anticipated Olympic Trials, there is a lingering fear that the gritty exploits of the athletes on the famous Hayward Field oval will be over-shadowed by the gremlins skittering about Rio De Janeiro in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games, gremlins like state insolvency, crime, water pollution, the Zika virus, pandemic drug abuse, inter-sex competition, and the moral corruption of the bodies charged with overseeing the health of the sport.  Fast times tend to pale in the face of such upheaval.
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Notwithstanding, the whole SI cover thing got me thinking.  Heroes gestate in the womb of kid’s dreams, be they decathletes or transgender pioneers.  Deep into the night the exploits of heroes dance through the unconscious mind like lottery balls in a cage, and from those dreams are born the next generation’s heroes, which is why for heroes to exist at all they must first be widely seen.


Coach Lisa Taylor
At the recent Brooks PR Invitational in Seattle, I reconnected with a friend from Michigan's Upper Peninsula who was in Seattle as one of the meet's chaperones. On the ride into town from Sea-Tac Airport, Lisa Taylor and I got into a conversation about heroes and inspiration, and how important a role those two elements play in the lives of young athletes. That conversation stirred the following.

In 1972 young Lisa Last (now Taylor) was only 11 years old.  She and a friend in Alma, Michigan walked into her friend’s dad’s TV store.  Lisa picks the story up from there.

“I was in fifth grade at the time, and when we came into the store all the TVs had track and field on, and I saw Mary Decker running.  And she was very small and tiny, and I was small and little.  So I was thinking, “what sport is for me?” And she was running well in the 800, and I was thinking, 'I can run track and field. That’s the sport for me.'  It was just a memorable thing.”


Lisa Last (now Taylor) while at Michigan State
Lisa is still pretty tiny, but she was big enough to be inducted into the Alma Schools Hall of Fame in 2009, big enough to have earned a track scholarship to Michigan State where she helped the Spartans win two Big Ten track titles. And for the last two-plus decades she's been big enough to coach cross country and track & field at Traverse City Central High School on Michigan's UP where she lives with husband Dave and daughter Ellie, who is heading off to Michigan State this fall.

nullTVs around the country will be following the exploits of America’s best at the 2016 Olympic Track and Field Trials beginning this Friday from Eugene, Oregon. NBC will cover the meet for TV. Sports Illustrated will also be on hand, most likely with Tim Layden, a real track aficionado.

As in every Trials heroes old and some brand new will be featured and discovered.  And there will be thousands of latter day Lisa Lasts in the audience watching and reading.  And for them even powerful viruses, rancid pollution, and venal corruption won’t be able to snuff out the dreams that will bloom late in the coming nights. Fortunately, there are some things that remain incorruptible.