ESPN Olympic Sports

BOSTON -- With Super Bowl hoopla sucking up the sports oxygen on the East Coast this week, there still were more than a few people in the region (many with great VO2 maxes, no doubt) just as excited by the recent start of the track and field season.

They showed up en force for the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix here Saturday night, with the crowd of 4,072 marking the eighth straight sellout of the event at the Reggie Lewis Center on the Roxbury Community College campus.

The bustling meet at the Reggie, together with the previous week's inaugural U.S. Open at Madison Square Garden in New York, produced a few revelations as the sport limbers up for the Olympic year:

1. Schism for some, opportunity for others

Madison Square Garden and its longest-running event, the Millrose Games, finalized an ugly divorce last year. After 98 years in the world's greatest sports arena, Millrose took its starting blocks uptown to the fast track at Manhattan's 168th Street Armory, where the venerable games will be held Saturday.

USA Track & Field, the sport's governing body, decided it still wanted a meet at the Garden and hastily put together its own show on Broadway.

Suddenly, athletes had a chance to compete in three East Coast meets in successive weeks, and they liked it. Hurdler David Oliver, the 2008 Olympic bronze medalist who trains in Kissimmee, Fla., said the three-week East Coast swing gives him a chance to maintain a fairly regular training schedule by avoiding long flights to European meets. He's coming off a pelvic injury that hindered him at the end of last season, and the bang-bang-bang schedule is allowing him to gauge his recovery and focus on a different aspect of his race each week. In Boston, he concentrated on his arm action, which was good enough to earn the win in the 60-meter hurdles in 7.60 seconds.

Whether the regional track fan base will support the three-race minicircuit remains to be seen, but the early signs are positive. The Open drew 5,844 to the Garden, many of them Jamaican ex-pat fans who came to see Veronica Campbell-Brown and Asafa Powell win their 50-meter sprints. It was less than a third of the building's capacity, but it wasn't the attendance disaster some predicted for the event, and the atmosphere was loud and lively.

The same could be said for the New Balance meet. The crowd packed the small Lewis center with Boston's running clubs and members of the area's large Ethiopian diaspora community. The latter group came away happy once again, as national heroines Meseret Defar and Tirunesh Dibaba easily won the 3,000 meters and 2-mile run, respectively.

2. Lolo on a high

Of course, it wouldn't be track if there weren't a few kinks in the marketing system. At the U.S. Open, some boisterous male fans doffed their tops to reveal the message "We love Lolo" painted on their chests, an homage to popular hurdler Lolo Jones. The reward for their enthusiasm? They were escorted from their seats by security.

Luckily, the Garden muscle didn't remove Jones, who had the most electrifying moment of the Open with a victory over a rugged 50-meter hurdles field that included defending Olympic champion Dawn Harper and 2011 U.S. national champion Kellie Wells. Jones, who had surgery to correct a spinal defect last fall and saw her 2011 season cut short, went into the meet wondering about her career. She left with a huge smile, momentum that carried her to a meet record in Moscow this past weekend and a loud message that she's ready to be a factor in what will be one of the most contested events in London.

3. Travels, and travails, with Mo and Kip

One of the most hotly contested races at last year's world championships was the 5,000 meters, in which England's Mo Farah edged American Bernard "Kip" Lagat for the gold. Both pronounced themselves in great shape coming into the indoor season, taking time to train in Kenya over the winter and running a mile indoors to test their fitness over the past two weeks.

Lagat ran in the Open and went into the race a favorite based on his glorious history running the Millrose Wanamaker Mile in the same building. But he has been training solely for the 5,000 this year, got no help from the race's sluggish rabbit and didn't have quite enough speed at the end to outmaneuver young Kenyan Silas Kiplagat. Lagat turned in a slow time of 4:00.92 behind Kiplagat (4:00.65).

Farah ran the New Balance meet and finished his mile in fourth behind Ireland's Ciaran O'Lionaird, who trains with Farah under the tutelage of Alberto Salazar. But that told only half the story; the Brit showed grit when he was tripped in the first lap of the race, hit the deck and was trod upon by about half of the field. Undaunted, Farah got back up, caught the pack and held on for a personal record of 3:57.92 behind O'Lionaird's 3:56.01.

Advantage, Farah. But Lagat steps up to the 5,000 this week at the Armory, which might paint a truer picture of his early form.

4. Kids these days

Although knowledgeable Caribbean track watchers were well aware of 400-meter runner Kirani James' potential, the ex-Alabama NCAA star from Grenada surprised everyone by upsetting defending Olympic champion LaShawn Merritt at the world championships in Daegu, South Korea, last year and becoming, at 18, the youngest 400-meter titlist in history.

At Boston, he won easily in a time of 45.96, best in the world so far in the young season. Although he turned pro last year, James is staying with what works. He's still being coached by Harvey Glance, who recruited him to Bama, and living and training in Tuscaloosa. Why mess with a good thing? If all goes to plan, James will break the streak of American Olympic 400 gold medalists that dates back to 1980.

5. Strong silent type

The best performance of the first two weeks? That belongs to Jenn Suhr, the U.S. pole vaulter ranked No. 1 in the world in 2011. On Saturday in Boston, Suhr set an American indoor record of 16 feet. But the upstate New Yorker, known as Jenn Stuczynski when she won silver at the 2008 Olympics, didn't speak to the media after the event, so the public wasn't privy to how she went from no-heighting in New York to a spectacular performance over the weekend.

Suhr, who is married to her coach, Rick Suhr, has had issues with the media in the past, but at a time when the sport needs all the promotion it can get, skedaddling after a record-setting performance is like, well, no-heighting.

The day of the bus crash is a blank space in Stacy Sykora's memory. So is the week before. So are the 11 days afterward, days the three-time U.S. Olympic volleyball player spent in an intensive care unit of a Brazilian hospital, first in a medically induced coma, then conscious but with an uncertain prognosis due to her closed head injury.

That kind of amnesia is usually described as a blessing, and Sykora agreed it's probably best she doesn't have any recollection of the moment last April 12 when the Volei Futuro team bus, en route to a playoff game, skidded in a downpour and tipped over onto its side, shattering the windows and tossing the club's staff and players around like marbles in a tin can.

No one else was seriously injured. One woman had a broken arm, others were bruised and scraped. Sykora's teammates found her face down in a puddle of water. A passing driver offered to take her to the hospital. Two players accompanied her. Her condition, first reported as not serious, quickly deteriorated. Several of her friends from the U.S. national team made their way to Brazil, and the women's volleyball community held its breath.

Nine months and a thousand hours of rehab later, the 34-year-old Sykora is playing again and bears no outward sign of trauma, except that she wears more bobby pins in her hair (one side of her head was shaved and her hair is still growing out).

Her career prognosis is still uncertain, but in a telephone interview from Brazil last week, Sykora said she's "in a better mental place than I was before the accident." Her first competitive minutes since the crash came in January. She felt like she had "won the lottery ... I thought I would be nervous, but I was just so happy," she said.

Sykora will play in her accustomed libero (defensive specialist) position with Volei Futuro until April, fly to California via her home state of Texas, and rejoin the national team.

"I'll be there until I make the [Olympic] team or I don't make the team,'' she said, and sighed deeply. "First and foremost, it's about the team. Do I want to go? Yes. But I have to see how I work with this team. There are some great liberos who are fighting for the same position. ... I don't want [the accident] to be for me or against me. Regardless of what happens with me, it's going to be a great USA team."

That serenity didn't descend overnight for the Burleson, Texas, native, a two-time All-American at Texas A&M and 2008 Olympic silver medalist.

Sykora learned just how mysterious brain function can be when she emerged from a three-day coma and, she was later told, spoke Portuguese to the doctor, Italian to her agent and English to her mother at her bedside. She doesn't remember that, or learning to walk again. Her first memory is of circling a date -- April 23 -- on a calendar.

She was released from the hospital in early May, flew back to the United States and spent the summer and part of the fall shuttling between Casa Colina in Pomona, Calif., which specializes in helping patients recover from brain injuries, and the U.S. team's training base in Anaheim.

"They proved to me how important they've always been," Sykora said of her fellow players. "They helped me go from a one to a nine."

But she found it hard to fend off frustration at times. "I was big-time in the past," Sykora said. "I'd think, 'I could have dug that ball before the accident,' or 'I could have run that ball down.'"

Sykora was able to get fit relatively quickly, but her vision -- one of the things that made her a great libero -- had to be retrained like a muscle that had atrophied. A volleyball sailing through the air would sometimes disappear on her, like the moon ducking behind a cloud. Sykora had to put in long, tedious hours to regain clarity, light contrast and depth perception (and is still doing exercises five times a week). She needed ball touches, and she needed to re-map spatial relationships with her teammates on the court.

When the U.S. team traveled to the World Cup in Tokyo last October and secured an Olympic berth, Sykora wasn't yet ready to play a competitive match. She went back to Brazil and started traveling with the club again; she began dressing for games in December. And Sykora asked her Volei Futuro teammates to fill in the gaps about what had happened last April.

They told her she had been sitting on a teammate's lap, listening to music, when the bus flipped sideways. Everyone else grabbed their seats, but she went into free fall. They told her she was unconscious with her face in the water for perhaps 30 seconds, perhaps a minute; no one could be sure in the chaos of the moment. They told her how she was lifted out through a window and carried away. At one game, a man came up and introduced himself. "I'm the one who took you to the hospital," he said.

One day, boarding the team bus to go to an away match, Sykora insisted on recreating the scene and defiantly plopped down on the same teammate's legs. "I told them, 'I'm looked after now, this is not going to happen again,'" she said.

Everywhere Sykora goes, people tell her she's a walking miracle; but the true transformation has been internal, the kind of emotional depth perception that has nothing to do with 20/20 vision.

"I hope I get to 100 percent, but I'm content with where I'm at," she said. "I'm only focused on today. I don't look to the future at all. The only thing that matters, the only thing I have every day, is 24 hours to do everything I can."

Chloe Sutton turned 20 this week with a unique goal in sight. If all goes well for the next few months, she could become the first U.S. swimmer to have made Olympic teams in both open water and pool events.

Sutton, who swims for the Mission Viejo (Calif.) Nadadores club, blazed onto the open water scene at age 14 and over the next two years would win gold in the 10K at the Pan American and Pan Pacific Games and a bronze medal in the 5K at the 2008 World Championships. Sutton was the only U.S. woman to compete in the 10K race in Beijing in 2008, the first year the grueling discipline of open water was included in the Summer Games, and finished 22nd.

But by 2010, Sutton's double life was wearing thin. When she qualified for the open water worlds and the Pan Pac pool team -- events that were three weeks apart -- her coach, the venerable Bill Rose, asked where her heart was and Sutton put open water aside.

"She was never not a pool swimmer," Rose said. "Ninety-eight percent of her training was in the pool and geared for the pool." Sutton benefitted confidence-wise from her early success and grew because of her experience at the top level internationally in open water, Rose said.

Sutton has won the 400 in national and international competition and is a two-time national champion in the 800 since targeting the pool, but she's still in transition. Like many open water swimmers, she used a two-beat kick, but Rose has phased that out in favor of a six-beat kick to bump up her speed, asking her to give up her old two-beat cadence even in training. Sutton just completed that changeover and is racing both events with her revamped stroke now, but won't see what happens in a tapered meet until the Olympic trials in late June.

Rose said he thinks it will take an 8:18 to get on the Olympic podium in the 800 -- six seconds faster than Sutton's personal best, but achievable, he said.

"I have to give her so much credit," Rose said. "She has her eye on the prize. She lives the sport."

(Read full post)

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Despite a gloomy prognosis that her recovery from a torn right ACL and MCL could take six to eight months, U.S. defender Ali Krieger said Sunday she hasn't given up on the 2012 London Olympics.

"I'm not going to give up, not going to lose hope," Krieger said after watching her teammates beat Guatemala 13-0 on Sunday at the CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament. "People who have had this say everyone is different. Some people are back in four months, some people have gotten back in nine months, a year. But I'm going to stay hopeful and stay positive, and I'm pretty strong. I'm a fighter and I've been there before.

"I think I'm going to come back stronger than ever."

Krieger injured the knee in Friday's game against the Dominican Republic when an opponent collided with her plant leg. She said she knew it was bad, but didn't know it was that bad until the MRI came back Saturday.

"I didn't know it was my ACL," she said. "It didn't feel that bad, but I knew something obviously was wrong with that much pain."

Krieger said she will fly home to the D.C. area Monday and have surgery on the knee as soon as possible. "I'm going to get it done this week because I want to start that process started and try to get back. I'm still hopeful for the Olympics."

"I'm really sad for her," U.S. coach Pia Sundhage said. "She helped the team and she had a very good World Cup. That's tough for her, but at the end of the day, we can't do anything about it. The next step is to move on and find someone who can replace her. ... We need to look at it and find players to compete for that spot. But we have time, so I have no doubt in my mind. Maybe [the replacement] is already in squad, maybe she will be someone else coming in and fighting for the spot."

Krieger said her feelings have come in waves since the injury.

"It's been pretty emotional, pretty draining the past few days," she said. "This is the first time injuring my knee and it's pretty bad. Obviously, I want to be playing -- who doesn't? -- but I'm taking it pretty well. I'm staying positive and looking forward. I'm just taking one day at a time."

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Despite the record-setting score, the U.S. women's soccer team's 14-0 rout over the Dominican Republican might have come at a price. Defender Ali Krieger left the game in the first half with an injured right knee and her status for the rest of the Olympic qualifying tournament is unknown.

U.S. coach Pia Sundhage said the team won't know the full extent of Krieger's injury until it receives the MRI results Saturday.

"It's probably a serious injury, but by tomorrow we'll find out what it is," she said. "We as a team will move forward with or without her -- we just have to figure out what the deal is with her knee. We're obviously all thinking of her and wishing her nothing but success."

Krieger, who was not available for comment after the game, injured the knee when she fell awkwardly.

"She shoots and I think comes down funny on it," teammate Abby Wambach said. "With this kind of [turf] surface [at BC Place], you never know exactly what the prognosis is going to be until you get the results back from the MRI."

Wambach fell several times on her left knee and said she was happy to get a breather when Sundhage substituted Alex Morgan for her in the second half.

"We want her to last as long as we can in this tournament, which is one reason we took her out at halftime," Sundhage said. "The other reason is we have some good players on the bench."