Stephanie Brown Trafton

Stephanie Brown Trafton (born December 1, 1979) is an American track and field athlete who won the discus throwing gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She is a somewhat unusual modern athlete in that she is a two-time Olympian who has never qualified for the World Championships, nor won a major national championship.

2004 Olympics

Stephanie competed in the 2004 Olympic Trials in Sacramento, CA in both the shot put and the discus throw. Her best throw coming in to the discus competition was 192 feet. In the first throw of the discus final, Brown threw a 9 foot personal best of 201 feet 3 inches, surpassing the international A-standard mark, and qualified for her first Olympic team. In August 2004, Stephanie Brown competed at the Athens Games, and her best mark in the qualifying round failed to advance her to the finals. She placed 22nd with a throw of 192 feet even (58.54 m), under her 203 feet 1 inch (61.90 m) personal best at the time. She has expressed contentment with her performance there, saying, "2004 gave me an awesome experience. I came to the Olympics just out of college."


The 2008 Olympics

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Brown Trafton made what observers called "stunning improvement". She began 2008 with a personal best that was unchanged from 2004. However, she improved that mark in March, April and May 2008. Coming into the Beijing Olympics, her personal best was 217 feet 1 inch (66.17 m), achieved at the Hartnell Throwers Meet in Salinas, California. Until a June 21, 2008 mark of 218 feet 1 inch (66.51 m) by Romanian Nicoleta Grasu, this throw stood as the longest on record anywhere in the world in 2008. Moreover, it was the third-best American throw of all time, behind efforts by Suzy Powell and Becky Breisch. Prior to Beijing, she had placed third at the U.S. trials with a throw of 205 feet 5 inches (62.63 m). Asked to explain her dramatic improvement, Brown Trafton pointed to a key difference in her training regimen. Unusually for her, she did not take time off between the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Instead, she spent what would have normally been the season hiatus working on the "supplemental training" of "balance, agility and flexibility" with Tony Mikia, a physical therapist/sports performance trainer at Sacramento-based Results Physical Therapy and Sports Performance.

Although called by the mainstream American sports press "an unlikely savior of U.S. pride" and a "field filler more than a medal contender", a radically improved Brown Trafton actually came to Beijing with a reasonable possibility of winning. She had executed the second-best throw posted in the sport in 2008. And she had progressively upped her personal best by over 4 m across several meets during the 2008 season.

The first of her six throws displayed her progress to her competitors in Beijing. At 212 feet 5 inches (64.74 m), it bettered the field by almost two meters. She threw into the net on her second and third throws, then posted a 191 feet 7 inches (58.39) and a 201 feet 1 inch (61.30). By the sixth round, it was unnecessary for her to throw to win the gold medal, as the two remaining competitors had not bettered her initial mark. In the end, no one got within a meter of her first throw.