Adam Nelson: "This guy has no idea what's about to happen to him"

"I'm blessed with a very poor shortterm memory," says 2005 World Shot Put champion Adam Nelson when asked about 2008. Sitting in a coffee shop in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few javelin tosses from Nelson's current training facilities at the University of Virginia, Nelson is thinking a lot less about his worst Olympic performance in three appearances, and a lot more about the first memories of his four-month-old daughter, Caroline Grace.

"I'm not really equipped for what she needs right now, unless it's in bottle form," says Nelson, "But she recognises us now, and that's pretty cool, and she has that smile that melts your heart."

A father lights up quickly talking about his daughter, but let Nelson warm up about sport he's been pursuing professionally for the last decade (and will resume Friday evening at the Millrose Games, 30 Jan), and he can be just as enthusiastic, although with opinions he's had more time to refine.

Getting Beijing out of the way

Nelson's medal streak included two Olympic silver medals in Sydney and Athens, and a World Championship in Helsinki in 2005, Nelson tore an intercostals muscle days before the Beijing final. "I didn't even know what that was," he says, ruefully. "At least, I didn't know they were so important." Despite having several of the longest marks in the world in 2008, Nelson couldn't get a legal mark in his first three attempts in the final.

What disappointment Nelson may have had, however, is long gone.

"Anything that happens before the Olympic Trials, anything that happens before the Olympic Games, doesn't mean anything in the competition," he explains. "If it did, Tomasz Majewski wouldn't have a gold medal. But he does."

"I have no excuses and no regrets about my training over the last four years that would have made a difference. I was in phenomenal shape. I had a very bad time for an injury. But the Olympic Games... I can't crack that nut. In some ways, silver is worse, because I know how close I was. I've lost out on two gold medals by less than a total of three inches."

Breakthrough in 2000

If Nelson's short-term memory is as foggy as he claims, his long-term memory is sharp, bright, and vivid. He remembers sitting in a hotel coffee shop in the late spring of 2000 with Andy Bloom and Kevin Toth, two of America's leading shot putters of the time, as the pair divided up Olympic team places between them. They named two others as contenders, besides themselves, then looked over at Nelson. "You're on the bubble," they said.

At the time, Nelson was three years beyond his NCAA title, six years past his 1994 World Junior victory, and returning from a pectoral muscle tear which had threatened to end his so-far brief professional career. He beat both Bloom and Toth later that day, then went on to claim an Olympic spot at a Trials competition he calls his "breakthrough." Not just Nelson's, the 2000 Trials represented a breakthrough for the event in the U.S., as the heated competition engaged the crowd in a way Nelson hadn't seen before. "They had to stop the sprinting events in order for us to finish," he recalls.

"That's not how it normally works. We had so much crowd support, the officials couldn't get quiet for the start. We took over the stadium."

"It started showing people the throws as a complete competition. It's not like a running event which might only develop in the last 100m. It's a competition all the way through. When people focus attention and energy on your event, it makes you feel good. Feeding off that energy, as long as we can hold our technique, lets us throw even farther."

Rise of an event

With both of his teammates from the 2000 team retired, Nelson has become the elder statesman of a U.S. Shot Put cadre which not only dominates international competition (Reese Hoffa is the 2007 World champion and Christian Cantwell the 2008 World Indoor champion) but often claims a share of the spotlight in domestic meets. The spotlight is literal in the case of Friday (30) evening's Millrose Games, where track competition ceases and the outer lights dimmed while the big men perform in the circle.

"There aren't many other events" where the U.S. team is as competitive as it is in the Shot Put, Nelson explains. "The short sprints are feast or famine. The only other events where we're this strong are the 400m and maybe the Hurdles. If you want to break out, you either need awesome competition, or you need to be breaking records all the time."

One more Olympics?

Mentioning the hurdles raises the legacy of another Olympian from Atlanta, Allen Johnson. Nelson matched Johnson's standard of three Olympic teams in 2008, and for now he fully intends to make that number four in 2012.

"I'm still at the top of my game," says Nelson. "When I don't feel like competing anymore, I'll stop. My mind's going to take me out before my body will."

"At some point I'll find something I want to do more than this, and then I'll do that. But I haven't given my whole life to my training."

Tracing the story of Nelson's career as he tells it, as an arc of successive lessons and improvements rather than a jagged line of major competitions and annual rankings, makes the direction of his arrow clearer than the statistics do, and the direction is still "up."

Nelson is even learning from the sleep deprivation common to the parents of small children. "She's usually pretty good, but last night we were up at one, three, five... I really have to pay attention to my body now, and know whether the fatigue is from the lack of sleep or from overtraining."

Nelson's team starts with Virginia throws coach Carrie Lane and his long time strength coach, Rob MacIntyre, but his wife, Laci, and Caroline are part of the team as well.

"You start developing a daily schedule," said Nelson, "and they're a big part of that. When Laci had an internship in Atlanta and was away for the first part of the summer, it took a while to get used to that."

A sideline in activism

Nelson doesn't limit his enthusiasm for athletics to the throwing circle. In 2008 he was an athlete representative on the search committee which selected new USATF CEO Doug Logan. He considers that project a great success: "I was surprised at the quality of the candidates we interviewed. We interviewed a lot of good candidates, and Doug stood out as one of the best. He has the opportunity to be a transformational leader."

A related quest has been rehabilitating the image of his event, which in previous decades had acquired a reputation for performance-enhancing drugs, "intentional," he adds, "or unintentional." Nelson is pragmatic about the chance of banishing doping forever - "There are always going to be people who will cheat" and instead sees the goal as removing any grey areas. "There are parts of the world where it's not so black and white, and that needs to change."

"It's about how you approach it"

Everything, eventually, circles around to how much fun Nelson is having in the sport. "I go in trying to throw farther with every attempt," he says. "I've been criticised for that, but it's the only way I know. If someone throws farther than me, I'm not thinking, 'Oh no, he just threw farther than me.' I'm thinking, 'Oh, you want to play too? Come ahead, it's OK.' This guy has no idea what's about to happen to him."

Parker Morse for the IAAF