| | Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Marla Runyan completed her heroic
odyssey from Paralympic champion to Olympic qualifier Sunday,
overcoming blindness and a serious leg injury to make the U.S. team
for the Sydney Games.
|  | | Marla Runyan finished third in the 1,500 finals, earning a ticket to Sydney. |
Runyan, legally blind since childhood, finished third in the
women's 1,500 meters to join Regina Jacobs and Suzy Favor-Hamilton
on the Olympic team. She raised her arms in triumph after crossing
the finish line, and leaped in the air.
"It's very awesome," said Runyan, the first legally blind
athlete in any sport to qualify for a U.S. Olympic team.
"I think my vision is just a circumstance that happened and I
don't look at it as a barrier. I never said I want to be the first
legally blind runner to make the Olympics. I just wanted to be an
Olympian."
Runyan won the 100, 200, 400 and long jump in the 1992
Paralympics, and won the pentathlon in the 1996 Paralympics. A
standout high jumper in college, she finished 10th in the 1996 U.S.
Olympic trials heptathlon, then turned exclusively to
middle-distance running. She moved to Eugene to live and train,
overcoming a series of injuries before bursting onto the national
scene last summer by winning the gold at the Pan Am Games.
Runyan came from sixth place midway through the race to finish
third in 4 minutes, 6.44 seconds. She survived a bump on the second
lap that forced her to lean on Shayne Culpepper, who finished
fourth, to keep her balance.
Jacobs made her fourth Olympic team, winning in 4:01.01.
Favor-Hamilton, who has had to deal with the suicide of her brother
and major Achilles' tendon surgery in the last 18 months, was
second in 4:01.81.
"My strategy basically was to get third. I said Regina and Suzy
can do whatever they want to do," Runyan said.
Runyan, 31, has a degenerative retina condition that allows her
to see only peripherally and reduces other runners to streaks of
light. She has had Stargardt's Disease since the fourth grade, and
has learned to cope with it.
The more pressing concern for Runyan was a left leg injury that
prevented her from running for five weeks until Friday's
first-round heats of the 1,500. She injured tendons in the leg when
she jumped out of the way of a child on a bicycle.
The injury was so bad she considered pulling out of the trials,
and was unable to warm up Sunday before the 1,500 final. Wearing a
bronze medal around her neck after the race, she still found it
hard to believe she had overcome the leg problem.
"It felt like a miracle. Normally I would have been going into
this very confident, but when this injury occurred I was just
counting my blessings that I would be able to run."
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