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Going to Sydney Former Paralympic champ Runyan makes Olympic team
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- From a Paralympic champion to an Olympic qualifier. Marla Runyan completed her heroic odyssey Sunday, overcoming blindness and a serious leg injury to make the U.S. team for the Sydney Games. 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," Runyan said. "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.
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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