Story by Mark Zeigler (ref: https://m.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jul/25/accidental-olympian/ )
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
LONDON — Christine Sonali Merrill was born in Bakersfield and attended tiny Bakersfield Christian High, which at the time operated the school out of a church. It had no running track, and no track team.
When she was a junior, Bakersfield Christian moved to a spacious new campus that had a football field and a 400-meter dirt track around it. The Eagles still had no boys track team but fielded a girls team, which consisted of Merrill, her younger sister and three other girls — “enough,” she says, “for a 4×400 relay team.” They didn’t have track singlets, so they wore shorts and softball jerseys.
“We had numbers on the back,” Merrill says.
She laughs with you. It all seems so crazy, so surreal. Christine Merrill: The accidental Olympian.
Merrill, now 24, is in London to run the 400-meter hurdles for Sri Lanka, which wouldn’t be so wildly improbable if she had actually planned to run track at UC San Diego or knew her mother’s heritage could provide a path to the Summer Games or knew that Sri Lanka would pick her as its wild-card entrant after she just missed the Olympic qualifying standard.
Merrill’s parents are both pediatricians who met during residency. Her plan was to get a mechanical engineering degree from UCSD and then a lucrative job. Which she did. She works full-time for San Diego’s Solar Turbine in the customer design division, adapting massive gas turbine engines to function in remote locales and climates, be it torrid deserts or Canadian tundra.
Track?
She reached the California state prep meet as a junior and senior at Bakersfield Christian, but when she learned that UCSD didn’t offer traditional athletic scholarships she decided to focus on ME, which ranks among the school’s most competitive and demanding majors.
“I didn’t know what college sports meant,” Merrill says. “I just knew a lot of people said it’s a lot of work. I figured, if they’re not going to give me (scholarship) money for it, what’s the point? I intended not to run, but Darcy tricked me into it.”
Darcy is Darcy Ahner, the Tritons women’s head track coach. She gave Merrill the spiel about how it’s possible to combine academics and athletics at UCSD, how athletes often become better students because they learn how to manage their time more efficiently. She suggested Merrill try it for a year; if she didn’t like it, she could quit.
Merrill agreed and left to go play some pickup basketball on courts outside Sixth College. Took a jab step, blew out her knee and assumed that was that — her collegiate track career was over before it began.
But Ahner accompanied Merrill to her surgeon’s consultation and monitored her yearlong rehab. Ahner knew what Merrill didn’t; the track COACHES RUNprospective athletes through basic speed and power testing, and Merrill’s numbers were off the chart.
“We were like, ‘We’ve got a little gem here,’?” Ahner says. “She was from such a small school and ran on a dirt track and wasn’t really challenged, so I don’t think she really knew how good she was.”
By her junior year, Merrill had won the Division II NCAA championship in the 400 hurdles. As a senior, she went 58.04 to set the school record.
Back in Sri Lanka, Merrill’s grandfather (her mother was born and schooled there) wrote a small article in a Colombo newspaper about her prodigious Div. II track career in the States. Someone from the national track federation read it and contacted the U.S. embassy, which contacted UCSD, which contacted Ahner.
Says Merrill: “One day my coach texts me: ‘Sri Lanka is looking for you.’?”
Her personal best of 56.83 seconds is slower than 23 American women this year, and it is .18 seconds shy of the Olympic qualifying standard. But if a country has no one achieve a standard in any event, it can enter one wild-card athlete of each gender. Merrill, despite not living on the tropical island off the southwest coast of India, was selected over three others.
She is hardly, though, one of the hundreds of so-called “tourist” athletes that regularly populate the Summer Games. Her coach since graduating from UCSD in 2010, Joey Tosta, was a former hurdler himself and is married to Sheena Johnson Tosta. They moved to San Diego shortly before the 2008 Olympics, and Sheena was the surprise silver medalist in the 400 hurdles.
Merely surviving the first round is the goal for Merrill in London, but Tosta is talking medal in 2016 in Brazil.
“She’s just young athletically,” Tosta says. “She’s coming from a Div. II school, where if any athlete turns in a good performance or practice it’s appreciated but not expected. They’re students first, athletes second. Now she’s being pushed harder than she ever has before and taken out of her comfort zone.
“She was scared to hurt. Your body is going to be in shock and it’s going to hurt, but you push through it. That’s what this event is.”
Merrill spent her own money traveling to pre-Olympic meets in Jamaica and Belgium this summer chasing the qualifying standard, and now she’s taking more time off for the Olympics. She trains six days a week, usually before work. She quickly showers, changes and spends the rest of the day evaluating whether structural engine removal beams can handle the weight in sub-zero temperatures or whether pressure differential switches will still work when the mercury hits 140.
“It’s pretty much a miracle every day,” Merrill says of her dual life. “It makes me focus on the basics — sleeping, eating. Luckily my employer is flexible. As long as I can get my work done, they’re OK with that.”
Merrill tries to visit Sri Lanka for a few weeks each summer, and she’s continuing to learn the language. She recently was featured on the cover of a Sri Lankan magazine. She also has begun using her middle name of Sonali.
It’s a Sinhalese word, meaning “golden.”
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