Life’s sweet for Pickler

PULLMAN – The perks of being an Olympian aren’t lost on Diana Pickler. For instance, her shoe sponsor, Asics, is stitching her a special pair of spikes for Beijing, personalized with her name. On the night she made the team, she walked into a Eugene, Ore., pizza house with her family and received a standing ovation from the diners.

Accessories and acclaim are fine, but the true bonus is realized mostly in her head, when she’s grinding out repeat 200-meter sprints on a lonesome track in the heat of a Pullman summer.

“When I’m tired or feeling like I don’t want to be out there, I can really flip that around now,” she said. “I just remind myself that I’ve been training for the Olympics for a year with it just being a goal. Now I really am training for it. It’s right there. So if I’m in a bad mood or getting frustrated, it’s easy to block out.”

As if you could find much gray in her mood these days.

With a third-place finish in the heptathlon at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, the 24-year-old Texan became one of three Washington State alums to earn a trip to Beijing next month. Her fellow Cougs on the team – distance runner Bernard Lagat and discus thrower Ian Waltz – were near locks for spots going in, and won their events with relative ease.

But Pickler had an intimate brush with the heartless crucible that is the American selection process – and learned a little about herself by simply surviving.

It took a lifetime best of 6,257 points, but Pickler claimed the final berth in the heptathlon by the narrow margin of 10 points over Gigi Johnson, a 29-year-old veteran in her third Trials. On the scoring tables that govern the event, 10 points is the difference of an inch-and-a-quarter in the long jump, a centimeter in the high jump, seven-hundredths of a second in a hurdles race.

In Pickler’s case, it meant having to stay within a second-and-a-half of Johnson in the final event, the 800 meters – a race in which Johnson’s lifetime best was some 5 seconds superior.

“My eyes were welling up,” Pickler admitted. “It wasn’t that I was scared, but I was almost overwhelmed because I was going to have to do something I’d never done.”

Pickler tucked in behind Johnson from the gun, resisted the temptation to pass with about 250 meters left (“It would have changed the race – I’d have been running scared instead of under control”) but then saw Johnson inch away with about 70 meters to go, though not far enough to overtake her rival.

“I didn’t see her right after the race because I was caught up in my own emotions,” Pickler said. “I saw her the next day and honestly my heart started racing because I didn’t know what to say to her, but she was so classy about it. You want to beat someone in that situation – you have to just to make the team – but I felt bad for her because I know how hard she worked for it.”

Just as she had some of her thrill dampened by the disappointing performance of her twin sister, Julie. The two split up after finishing their WSU eligibility – Diana staying to train with coach Rick Sloan, Julie returning to Texas. Julie had scored a lifetime best of 5,990 points in a May heptathlon in Italy, the seventh-best mark in the Trials field. But she struggled in 11th after the first four events, 300 points out of contention, and wound up withdrawing before the 800.

“It was hard,” Diana said. “I tried not to talk about my excitement so much, but she’s like, ‘No, no – you talk about it, you deserve it.’ But it’s hard on the family, trying to be encouraging to me and consoling to her. I know how frustrating it is when it’s completely out of reach and you’ve worked and trained every single day. That’s an awful feeling. But I had to put those feelings for her aside and focus, because it was going to be a battle for me.”

And, of course, another one remains.

Despite marks like a 6-foot, 1/4-inch high jump, a 13.13-second clocking in the hurdles and a 20-53/4 long jump, Pickler’s total score is only 17th on the world list this year.

But she believes the experience in the Trials 800 “changed me as an athlete” – much like her first major international meet did a year ago.

Pickler made the U.S. team to the IAAF World Championships in Osaka, Japan, in 2007 but finished 25th with a score nearly 400 points less than her best. It came at the end of a full indoor and outdoor collegiate season and Pickler confessed that “I was mentally tired and I let the competition get to me.

“I wasn’t out there thinking I deserved to be out there. I wasn’t standing tall like I usually do. I remember walking around the practice track afterward and telling Coach that I learned more than I thought I ever could. It wasn’t fun. I wasn’t confident. That’s the worst feeling in the world to go out there and compete so insecurely, and I would never do that again.”

Even so, it will take a significant jump to put her in the top 10 in Beijing. But at the moment, scores and placings aren’t really on her mind.

“I wake up in the morning thinking that this is something that’s never going to be taken away from me,” she said. “I’m always going to be an Olympian and I think that’s so cool. It can’t be reversed. It’ll always be there.”

The best perk of all.