It seems only right that Chick Hislop has been appointed to coach America's Olympians. After all, for 35 years he has been molding athletes of marginal talent into national-class distance runners. At last, he can train and observe the best talent in the country.
Hislop, Weber State's longtime track coach and steeplechase guru, has been named the distance coach of the 1996 U.S. Olympic Track and Field team. For him, it is the chance of a lifetime. He can barely sleep nights. Imagine being a mechanic and working on Fords all your life, and then suddenly someone gives you a garage full of Lamborghinis.Hislop confesses that ever since he was given the job nearly a year ago, he has been given to daydreaming about the Atlanta Olympic Games. His wife will be talking to him, and the next thing he knows she's saying, "Chick, you haven't been listening to me."
"Yeah, my mind drifts to the Olympics a lot," he says. "It's like your first love. I remember being in school and I'd be thinking of my wife. That's what it's like."
Love is the only way a man could do what Hislop is doing. He's been home only a few days from late May, going from the NCAA track championships in Eugene, Ore., to the Olympic track and field trials in Atlanta to the Olympic training camp in Chapel Hill, N.C., and next week to the Olympic Games. For this, he won't get paid a dime, except per diem, and he gets one extra ticket.
"It's just an honor to do it," says Hislop, who will pay about $15,000 to provide airfare, accommodations and tickets for his family.
Hislop was nominated for the position by Brooks Johnson, the former head Olympic track coach, at a meeting of the International Competition Committee last summer. "Here's a guy who has paid his dues year in and year out serving the sport," Johnson said of his nomination. "He deserves to be an Olympic coach." Hislop was voted to the position on the first ballot.
Hislop, who began coaching at Weber in 1969 after eight years in the high school ranks, has earned an international reputation for his success with distance runners at Weber State, particularly steeplechasers. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and when Hislop realized after a few years that he couldn't recruit national-class distance runners at Weber, he came up with a remedy: He'd create them.
He believed that an undertalented runner could move up in the world if he switched from the flat (no hurdles) distance races to the 3,000-meter steeplechase, where superior technical skill (hurdling) could be the equalizer of talent. If a runner could place in the 5,000 at the conference championships, for instance, he could win the steeplechase in the conference meet or qualify for nationals in the event.
Doug Friedli was Hislop's guinea pig. Friedli was a 4:06 miler, which made him a solid performer in conference races, but a distant also-ran at the national level. Hislop switched Friedli to the steeplechase, and he became an All-American. Others followed.
In the past 21 years, 20 Weber State steeplechasers have qualified for the NCAA championships, four of them more than once. Nine have earned All-American awards - Friedli, Farley Gerber (the 1984 NCAA champion), Mark Wayment, Paul Henderson, Darin Williams, Chris Cary, Brad Barton, Kurt Black and Mat Godfrey. Weber also has produced six national junior champions in the steeplechase and three runners-up.
"Most of these kids weren't good enough in the flat events," says Hislop. "Only one of them, Farley Gerber, had enough talent to qualify for nationals in a flat race."
All nine of the All-Americans grew up in the Intermountain West. Some of them had never so much as placed in their state high school meet. Bob Evans, no better than a 10:42 two-mile runner in high school, qualified for this year's NCAA meet.
"Chick is considered the best steeplechase coach in the country and has been for a long time," says Bob Wood, long distance chairman for USA Track and Field.
Weber steeplechasers have become such a fixture at the NCAA championships that a coach once told Hislop, "You know two things are going to happen in the NCAA meet - there's going to be green (Baylor) in the 400 and purple (Weber) in the steeplechase."
Hislop squeezes every possible second out of the steeplechase with technique and strategy. In the early days, steeplechasers didn't hurdle barriers as much as jump them, with both legs directly underneath them rather than splayed like a hurdler. This cost time and energy. A jumper expends considerable energy going up in the air rather than up the track; a hurdler takes off and lands farther away from the hurdle, which maintains momentum.
Hislop trains distance runners like hurdlers, with an emphasis on hurdle technique, albeit with several subtle modifications. His runners accelerate into the hurdle and tuck the trail leg under the body rather than to the side like a sprint hurdler. The reason? Because distance runners aren't moving as fast as sprint hurdlers, and it requires more energy to whip the leg back around from the side.
"Coaches used to say there was a 35-second difference between a runner's flat time in the 3,000 and the steeplechase," says Hislop. "My people can run a 20-second difference. And Kurt Black is 11 seconds. It demonstrates the importance of technique."
Over the years, Hislop has been eager to share his ideas about the steeplechase and distance training. He has mailed film, written articles, organized clinics and gabbed for hours on the phone about the subject.
Last December's clinic in Ogden attracted every American Olympic contender in the steeplechase, except one. Meanwhile, Donovan Bergstrom, the 1991 NCAA champion from Wisconsin, has moved to Ogden to train with Hislop, and BYU graduate Mark Johansen drives from Provo to Ogden a couple of days a week to train with Hislop.
"I was at the Penn Relays this year and noticed that it's getting harder to pick out Weber steeplechasers because everyone is better hurdlers," says Hislop. "We used to be so much better hurdlers than everyone else that we really stuck out."
Hislop, who will be in charge of Olympic athletes in the steeplechase and 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs, will now share his ideas with Olympians, although to what degree remains to be seen. The Olympic coach does little actual coaching since most Olympic athletes have personal coaches.
"I'll be more of a liason between the athletes and their coaches," says Hislop. "Their coaches will not be there in camp. They've contacted me. They'll give their workouts to me, and I'll monitor the workouts. I'll have to use my own judgment as to whether there should be any variation in the workout."
Given his record, Hislop seems just the man for the job.