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What he’s Done:
Won the 2008 Olympic 400-meter final
Anchored the USA’s 2008 gold-medal-winning 4x400 relay team.
Blazed a 43.75 400-meter PR
It (track and field) is a sport where you can’t point the finger. In any other sport, you can blame someone else if you lose, but because it is an individual sport, you can’t really blame anybody but yourself, so you have to practice.
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| Merritt wins the 2004 Nike Indoor HS Champs 400
Photo by PhotoRun
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On running the Olympic 400-meter final: I really took it like, ‘Okay, I’ve raced everybody I’m about to race before.’ Nobody was in the race who I hadn’t beaten before. I’d been through the three rounds at the World Championships the year before, so it was really like ‘get through the rounds and get to the final and run the same race I’ve been running.’ Just put it all together. It was, ‘Okay, you’re here, you know you’re ready because of your workouts and you’ve been here before. The only thing is there are more people in the stands and more people watching.’ But it’s still 400-meters.
When I crossed the line, it made me a firm believer that hard work does pay off.
On leaving college early to turn pro: My situation was that I was dominant in my conference, Conference USA, and I got invited to the meet in Arkansas and I competed against everybody who was a professional and I won. So it was like, ‘Okay, we (Nike) want you to run for us and we’ll still pay for you to go to school.' It was a win-win situation for me.
For me as a sprinter, I started doing more distance, like 30-minute runs, to build my wind up.
I was doing a little bit of modeling before the season started, trying to test it out a bit. So far, I’ve only done runway stuff. I did a couple of fashion shows, photo shoots. I have people working on that and maybe it’s another avenue I can go down one day.
My mom has always told me just to go out and have fun. That has stuck with me. When I go out there, I just have fun. She’s been saying that for years.
Parting Words: Believing is achieving. You have to believe something to actually achieve it. I am the Olympic champion, so if somebody else says they’re going to do something, my only response is going to be, ‘Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’m here and I’m going to do what I got to do.’
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