COLORADO SPRINGS, CO – Do you like Dan or Dave?
Reebok wanted you to pick a side. It was early 1992, and the shoe company launched a bold campaign by putting two virtually unknown decathletes all over America's television screens, starting with the Super Bowl.
“I'm unstoppable, but, uh oh, something happens,” say Dan O’Brien, the former American decathlete remembering how he was on top of the world heading into that summer. “I look back on it, and I understand why it happened and how it happened.”
O’Brien, at the peak of his powers, stumbled at the Olympic trials. He didn’t make the U.S. team. While Dave Johnson went to Barcelona, Spain, O’Brien fled to his apartment in Moscow, Idaho.
“You're just like, ‘How on earth did this happen?’” O’Brien says.
“Because you put so much into it, and not just the time on the track, but you dream about it, you think about it. You obsess over it. And when it doesn't happen, then you're like, ‘OK, what am I doing wrong?’ And that's the moment that you personally have to take ownership.”
It’s a story that hits home for many of us: We’re really good at something like a sport and then, we’re not, as we struggle or others catch up. What we do next can shape the rest of our lives.
O’Brien, who found something more inside of himself after failing during two significant moments of his, went on to future glory at one of the Olympics' most arduous events. He spoke with USA TODAY Sports on the occasion of a new U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum exhibit here that was his idea and inspiration.
“A Legacy of Victory: U.S. Olympic Decathletes,” which O'Brien helped design, highlights the legacy of U.S. Olympic decathletes, who have won 27 medals at it, and what it takes to compete across 10 events over two days.
“The perseverance part, I think, was just natural for me,” says O’Brien, 60. “I lost a lot of Little League games. We lost in the (state) semifinals my senior year in high school football, and we were, by far, the best team. And when I saw other people broken down by failures, that's just when I got better.”
He had help from a few significant coaches, who carefully guided O’Brien but then let him do the work to figure out his journey. He spoke with us his about road to becoming “World’s Greatest Athlete” and how his story can help your young athlete build resilience.
Things can come easily for us, but, if we pursue them and get good at them, they become a lot harder. How do we react?
O’Brien thinks he was born with speed. He says he could outrun everyone in his fifth grade physical education class for 50 yards. Then he beat the fastest sixth grader at lunch.
That school year, he won the first race he ever entered, at a homecoming football game, outsprinting another kid in a one-mile fun run to the line. O’Brien, adopted into a large family that operated a farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon, remembers telling his mom in high school: “I'm leaving this farm, and I'm never gonna work this hard again.”
She laughed and said, “You're gonna spend your whole life working.”
His mother had a rule he couldn’t get a grade lower than a “C,” and he had a “D” in social studies his freshman year of high school. But his pottery teacher, Larry Hunt, also the high school track & field coach, offered to help him get his grades up, and he introduced him to the decathlon.
The Olympic decathlon champion is also sometimes referred to as the “World’s Greatest Athlete.” He has the highest cumulative score over a 100-meter dash, long lump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter hurdles, discus and javelin throws, and pole vault and 1,500-meter run.
“I remember doing that first decathlon, just thinking, brother, I'm never doing this again,” O’Brien says. “Well, the next year rolled around, and I did it again, and so I did one decathlon each year in high school, till I was a senior, and then I qualified for the junior Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984.”
University of Idaho track coach Mike Keller wouldn’t leave O’Brien’s kitchen in Klamath Falls until he signed a letter of intent.
“I just signed the best guy I’ve ever signed,” Keller announced at the time.
But O'Brien says he wasn’t prepared for Division 1 college academics. He lost his scholarship.
He got a job in a cabinet making store in Moscow, Idaho, knowing the trade because of all that hard work his mother did around the farmhouse.
It paid well but, O’Brien says, “no 20 year old wants to be waking up for a 7 o'clock job.”
He remembers going to track at the University Idaho, watching, and thinking: How do I get back?” When his contract changed, and he lost the job, he remembers knocking on Coach Keller’s door on a cold, snowy day.
“How do I get back in school?” he asked.
“I think if I don't go to his house that day, then who knows where I end up?” O’Brien says.
We can learn a lot from athletes on the other side, and the ones who come before us
Coach Keller made arrangements for O’Brien to run at Spokane Community College under coach Duane Hartman. Within an hour of meeting Hartman, O’Brien had a job in the cafeteria, a place to stay and a third man who saw something in him.
“He just had so much belief in me,” O’Brien says. “He even had too much belief in me at times.”
It’s what every young athlete needs. O’Brien worked his way back to Keller and Idaho by the end of his college career, and he teamed with Rick Sloan at neighboring Washington State for field events. The steps started coming.
Looking back, O’Brien feels like every up and down, every interaction, was preparing him for what happened in 1996. He qualified for the 1988 Olympic trials while still in junior college, then qualified for the Olympic trials in Indianapolis.
There, he met Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the American who would win two golds that summer, and something clicked inside of him.
“This is what I'm here for, is to do the decathlon,” he remembers telling himself.
“Trust me,” he continues, “I tried to get out of it, tried to run faster in the hurdles, tried to long jump better. … In a two-day period, you're gonna be exhausted. You're gonna be tested, you're gonna be tried. You're gonna have to push yourself, maybe, someplace you've never gone physically, mentally, and you stress about that a little bit. And by the time you get to the end, you can't explain the fatigue. To bend down and tie your shoes is somewhat of an effort, but then when the gun goes off in the 1500, you find the will to race. But it's such a freeing feeling of crossing the finish line, finishing 10 events.
“Doing a decathlon is like driving all night when you're tired.”
He learned to find levity by having fun with his opponents, talking to them during the two-hour breaks in between events. He spent a lot of time on the practice track and in the warmup areas with guys from around the world, drawing fuel from the knowledge they were “brothers in combat” just for competing in the event.
O’Brien, now the top collegiate decathlete in the country, got injured in 1989, but remembers doing testing that year at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, and finding himself off to the side with Dave Johnson, who would win the U.S. championship that year.
“You're a guy that I'm looking at,” Johnson told him. “You're somebody who's gonna be really, really good."
“I didn't even think he knew who I was,” O’Brien thought.
How can we find strength in our biggest failures?
O’Brien finished second to Johnson nationally in 1990 and won it all in 1991, going from scoring 8,000 to 8,400 to more than 8,800 (breaking Bruce Jenner’s American record) over three years.
The competition for the 1992 Olympics was on, although O’Brien always considered Johnson, about three years older than him, a mentor.
“The media pitted us as rivals, but we were good friends,” O’Brien says. “We were going into this thing together.”
They were together for filming for the Reebok commercials in November and December 1991, at Los Angeles Lakers games, or at various junior colleges.
“It just was so not glamorous as you think television is,” O’Brien says. “A guy comes and picks you up at 5 a.m. every single day. Even if you don't do anything till 9 o'clock, it’s a 5 o'clock call. I remember Dave and I sitting around a lot.”
He’d go to Los Angeles for a week, which, he says, took him out of his training routine. He did as much as he could on his own, but he didn’t have coaches Keller and Sloan with him.
“If I don't have those guys, I probably don't get as much work in as I need to. And the decathlon is all about consistent work,” he says.
The “Dan and Dave” buildup, through numerous commercials showing baby pictures of them contrasted with ones of them competing at grueling events, was immense. In New Orleans, site of the Olympic trials, painter’s hats were handed out with either “Dan” or “Dave” on them, urging fans to take sides.
It was sweltering outside, and at their eighth event, the pole vault, Johnson remembers sitting in a shady area. He saw O’Brien miss his first attempt. Then he missed his second, and Johnson remembers feeling the pressure with his rival.
O’Brien missed the third, getting a “no-height” in the event and costing himself a bid in Barcelona. Johnson saved a little face for Reebok with a bronze in Barcelona, despite developing a stress fracture after trials.
O’Brien went home to Moscow, and something changed. He hid in his apartment for two weeks, but when he came out, he remembers an elderly woman giving him a hug and telling him, “We still love you.”
“It was just like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna be all right,’” O’Brien says. “I just reassessed and got ready for the next thing.”
'I'll be as good as I want to be': The motivation comes from inside
Coach Larry Hunt had followed the history of the decathlon and told O’Brien about some of the American winners when the young runner was growing up: Jim Thorpe, Bob Mathias, Milt Campbell, Rafer Johnson, Bill Toomey, Bruce Jenner.
O’Brien broke the world record later that summer, and started the next season with a purpose: To be up on the stage with the Olympic decathlon champions before him. But how would he do it?
During our interview, he recalled a line from Fred Samara, who coached track and field at Princeton for 46 years. Samara said he knew he did a good job coaching when he could sit up in the stands and not say anything.
O’Brien came to realize, during those long four years between 1992 and 1996, the autonomy you need to get the best out of yourself in sports.
“A coach can't always fix it for you,” he says. “So let's put an athlete in a position to figure things out themselves. It's like, ‘OK, my coach isn't here. How far am I pushing myself? What am I willing to do? What am I learning on my own?’ And so I really got into the process.”
He noticed when he would later volunteer to work with track athletes at Washington State and Arizona State, they would show up, take two dozen throws during the time allotted for that event, and move on. But where were the 100 extra javelin or discuss throws on their own? Where were the 50 shot-puts into a canvas when you were home?
“After '92, I took a lot of ownership and said, ‘I'll be as good as I want to be,’” O’Brien says. “Before it was just, man, I'm following instruction. At that particular time, I’m 26, 27 years old, and I'll never forget, Coach Sloan said to me, ‘You’re the boss of this whole thing. I show up here, and you allow me to coach you, but you're the boss,’ and everything changed at that moment.”
O’Brien took the lead on figuring out his lifts and his workouts, and he carried his poles when he wasn’t near a coach. He qualified for the 1996 Olympics.
He was stressed ahead of Atlanta, but was eased by watching the Magnificent Seven win gold at gymnastics. He also got a hug from Matt Ghafari, the American wrestler who lost a close gold medal match to Russian Aleksandr Karelin.
“I could have won the gold,” O’Brien says Ghafari told him, then threw a big hug around him two days before O’Brien was set to compete.
There was just something that felt different about the event being on American soil.
O’Brien was on the field when Michael Johnson set a world record in the 200 meters. And then O’Brien threw his javelin just under 70 meters for a personal record. The crowd erupted.
Usually in decathlon, you might have a group rooting for you. O’Brien had a whole stadium.
He was the last event of the night, and it was packed for the national anthem after he finally won Olympic gold.
The full-circle moment came when he O’Brien was competing at high jump and, in the pit beside him, Duane Hartman, the coach who took a chance on him at Spokane Community College, worked as an official. In between warm-up jumps, O’Brien went over and gave him a hug.
It was a reminder that while we learn to figure things out on our own, we can always lean on our support system.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He played baseball in high school, rowed in college and spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents to a college and high school baseball player. For his past columns, click here.
Order his "Youth Sports Survival Guide" for athletes and parents here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What can kids learn from this Olympic champion, and ill-fated TV star?
