Jumping for Joy

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A tall woman, dressed in black, eyes the high-jump bar. She leans back, steps forward, leans back, steps forward, visualizing her strides toward a bar set at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials opening height of 5 feet, 10.5 inches.

Her name is Adriane Stone and 20 months earlier, the Olympic Trials weren't even on her mind. At the time, she was a depressed alcoholic, 80 pounds overweight, on a seemingly endless downward spiral. Now she's here, and she's among the best in her sport. I desperately hope she'll clear at least one height.

I'd never even heard of her until hours earlier, when at lunch someone told me there was "this jumper from Hawaii" with a great story. I spent two hours online and on the phone, trying to track her down, but part of Stone's story is that she has no agent, not even a coach. It's pretty much a miracle that she's here, and I'm worried it will take another to get in touch with her before she goes back to Hawaii.

But sitting next to me is a 100-meter runner I'd talked to the day before. "You need to watch the high jump," she says. "There's this woman I met in the dorm... She has the most incredible story..."

A few minutes later, Stone exits the field. She's cleared her opening height on the first attempt, then done it again at 5' 11.5". That's all it took: she's made the final.

A few rounds of telephone tag later, we're sitting in a student lounge on the University of Oregon campus. 

Stone, 28, isn't truly new to the high jump. In 1999, she'd been a rising star, ranked seventh American on the Track & Field News all-time list. She even made it to the 2000 Olympic Trials, where she'd reached the finals. But the seeds of her decline were present.

"I was a hothead," she says, "wild and not really restrainable. I had a bunch of piercings and was really trying to find myself."

She was also smoking, something she'd done since age 14. It was an odd habit for a top competitor, and the desire to hide it isolated her from other athletes. "I would sneak off to the part of the campus where the hippies were, so nobody would see me," she says.

But through all this, her father was an anchor. "Every track meet, win or lose, I was excited to call home. He was always proud of me."

It was her father, in fact, who'd introduced her to the sport years earlier, when he caught her eying the high-jump pit at a track near her home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Within days, he'd built her one of her own from mattresses, tent poles, and a rope. 

"I have video of me running to the pit and jumping. Jumping, jumping, jumping, until the sun went down. It was fun, and somebody was living it with me," she says.

College took her to Saint Augustine's in Raleigh, where she trained under George Williams, who would go on to be head coach for the 2004 men's Olympic track and field team. In 2000, she was NCAA Division II champion. 

And then, with the Trials looming, she learned that her father had cancer. "I went to the Trials... and I don't remember them," she says. "All I could think about was my dad."

In the following months, as her father declined, Stone discovered alcohol. "It took away all the pain. Until the next day. Then I had to do it again." 

Then he died. She still tears up at the memory. "All I wanted to do was die with him. I left all my hopes, dreams, and ambitions - everything I wanted - I left with him and gave up."

The drinking mounted, but somehow she managed to finish college. "I didn't want to become a statistic," she says. She also gained weight, topping out in excess of 230 pounds.

Six years later, she was in Hawaii with three young children, drinking so much that each morning she'd be too hung over to move. She'd also had six surgeries, ranging from bladder repair to a hysterectomy. She'd even had to have part of her abdominal muscles removed to repair other tissues. "My body was falling apart," she says.

Soon after, her husband, a sergeant in the Army, was deployed to Iraq. 

"When there's nobody around, it gets really quiet and you begin to wonder," she says. "And all that came to mind was my dad."

That reminded her of her father's faith. "I knew nothing could save me except this God my dad had taught me about," she says. Like many people who've gone through truly dramatic conversion experiences, she knows the date precisely. It was November 1, 2006. It was also the day of her last drink and last cigarette. "After the first week I knew a miracle had been performed," she says.

She began walking, losing 30 pounds in the first month. The changes stunned her husband when he returned on leave. "Everything was brand new," she says.

As she got fitter, she shifted to running, aerobics, weightlifting - even boxing. Then, one day, even though she'd moved thousands of miles away, she spied her old coach in a downtown hotel. "He just dropped everything," she says. "He saw his prodigal child had come home. And all he said was ‘Are you jumping?' I laughed, and he said, ‘Give me a call.'"

She did. Williams connected her with Stanford University high-jump coach John Rembao, who started emailing workouts, many designed to stretch out the scar tissue in her stomach. "That was painful, but exciting," she says. "And it was fueled by people believing in me. I had a man I had never even met sending me all this stuff." 

But she had no high-jump facilities to practice with, so in December 2007, barely six months before the Trials, she went back to North Carolina. Due to bad weather, she was only able to get in one day of true practice before entering her first meet. But that was enough. In an indoor meet in early January, she cleared 5' 7" on her first jump, proving the comeback was real.

"And while that may not be high for Olympic jumpers," she says, "there was a victory that day that a lot of people didn't know. That victory began a year prior, when the Lord delivered me from alcoholism and completely cleansed my life."

Shortly after, she found another meet and cleared 5' 8". "I only got second place, but it didn't matter," she says. "I jumped an inch higher."

And then, with the Trials looming and needing to improve at least another four inches to get in, Stone got bronchitis. "I didn't train for a month because I was so sick," she remembers.

It looked hopeless, but she took comfort in a Bible verse. "Not by might nor power, but by my Spirit," it read. She found a meet in Hawaii - her last chance at qualifying for the Trials without another expensive trip, and cleared six feet, the minimum needed for Olympic Trials consideration. "Every time I think I've opened this present, there's more to it," she says. "When I go to meets, they say, ‘Who do you jump for?' I say, ‘I jump for Christ.' I get the craziest looks, and that's OK. It's who I represent."

Even clearing 6' didn't assure her of entry. It merely put her on a list, off of which only the top 26 were actually invited. As it turned out, she was one of only four to get in with the bare-minimum standard and she wasn't notified until two days before the preliminary. 

But the short notice didn't matter. The invitation caught her already en route, changing planes in an airport.

So far, I've asked her only one question, and she's talked for 45 minutes, holding little if anything back. "I'm not ashamed to say this stuff because I hope it helps somebody else," she says.

"What about the preliminaries?" I ask, and she brightens even more.

"The whole thing was amazing!" she says. Like many, she's particularly taken by the Hayward Field crowd, which exceeded 20,000 every day of the meet. "It's like they were jumping with me. They're doing the steps with you, and they hold their breath and they clench their bodies for you. I could feel the love."

The next day, she jumps again. 

Her story isn't well known but the word has spread. Like my 100-meter acquaintance, I myself have told the people I'm now sitting with to watch the woman dressed in black. Later, a friend tells me he noticed something special about her, simply from the way she behaved.

Again, she clears the first height easily. On the second height, she hits a new comeback best: 6' 0.5". But she struggles with the third, 6' 2.25", and finishes eighth.

I knew she'd been dreaming that the miracle would carry her all the way to the team. Who wouldn't? But I was also sure she wouldn't resent those who beat her. Each night during the Trials, she said, she'd pull up the start list on her computer and pray for the other jumpers. "They're not my competition. The bar is my competition," she'd said. "Is it a hope of mine to make it? Oh yeah!" But she adds, "If I don't, you will not see a frown on my face. Not at all."

And she was right. I was watching through binoculars as she made her final attempt. I did the steps with her, held my breath, clenched my body. And when the bar came down anyway, she was the one who stood and smiled.

But the story may not be over. A week later, she was on her blog wondering how, with her husband about to be deployed for another year, a mother of three might make a go of it as a professional athlete. If she does, don't count her out in 2012. One of the women ahead of her this year was Amy Acuff, just days shy of her 33rd birthday. That's older than Stone will be, come 2012.

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