The 10-day U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials begin tomorrow, and the heptathlon will be among the first events decided.
If she weren’t recovering from knee surgery, Anna Hall, who grew up in Greenwood Village and attended Valor Christian, would be the hands-down favorite to win the women’s equivalent of the men’s decathlon.
But she’s just 18 weeks out of what she insists was “a minor procedure” at the Steadman Clinic in Vail, so her goal is “to be in position to be on the team” representing the United States at next month’s Paris Summer Olympics.
If she achieves that goal, she’ll then focus on earning a medal—with the benefit of another month of rehab before she tries.
The injury was to her PCL, which is jock-speak for posterior cruciate ligament. She doesn’t know for sure when it happened, only that it’s different than the knee problem that contributed to her silver medal finish at last August’s World Championships.
The PCL is one of four major ligaments in the knee. It helps connect the thighbone to the shinbone.
Minimum recovery time for the particular procedure Hall underwent was put at 16 weeks, which meant missing the 2024 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland at the start of March.
“It breaks my heart to be passing on the indoor world championships,” she wrote on Instagram in late January, “but this was something we needed to do now in order to focus on the Olympics.”
Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the acknowledged G.O.A.T. of the heptathlon responded: “Stay strong and take it one day at a time, Champ.”
The world record holder and three-time Olympic gold medalist has become one of Hall’s mentors and an ardent admirer.
“She’s the best we are ever going to see,” JJK said last year during an online interview with Citius Mag.
“What I love about her is, she is going to compete. She has that competitive spirit. You can’t ask for anything more. That’s what the multi-events are all about.”
During an NBC Broadcaster Roundtable two weeks ago promoting the network’s coverage of the Trials, Trey Hardee, silver medalist in the decathlon at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, said of Hall:
“Anna Hall is a superstar. Anna Hall is fantastic . . . She’s tough as nails . . .”
Showing the competitive drive that both Joyner-Kersee and Hardee recognize, Hall returned to competition in 13 weeks—not 16—and had competed in three meets by mid-May.
“Nothing special . . . just plugging along,” she told Track World News recently. Asked about her confidence level heading into the Trials, she responded: “The Trials are never a given. Just taking it one event at a time.”
Interviewed at the end of March by Citius Mag, she had said: “It’s not the way I wanted to start an Olympic year.”
In addition to missing the World Indoor Championships, Hall had to skip what she calls her favorite meet, the prestigious Hypo in Gotsis, Austria. She came within 12 points of joining Joyner-Kersee as one of few heptathletes to reach 7,000 points in a meet there last year. But 7,000 points is not her concern right now.
“I’m trying to get ready for Trials,” she told Citius. “I’m really focused on that—get through the Trials and medal in Paris.”
The 2024 USATF Olympic Trials will be held at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, which presents its own unique challenge to Hall. It was there, during the U.S. Trials for the Tokyo Games, that Hall clipped a hurdle and broke her foot.
Not only did that deny her an opportunity to qualify for the trip to Japan, but it also threatened to derail a promising collegiate career.
Again, though, her competitive drive overcame that adversity. Eight months later she was back competing at the highest level.
She won both indoor and outdoor NCAA championships, and was a finalist for the 2022 Bowerman Award, collegiate track’s equivalent of football’s Heisman Trophy.
“The injury was a really big inflection point in my career,” Hall told Olympics.com in a 2023 interview. “I honestly don’t think I would have done what I did last year had I not gotten injured.”
Hopefully she can say the same thing about this latest injury and its impact on her performance at the 2024 Trials.
Denny Dressman is a veteran of 43 years in the newspaper business, including 25 at the Rocky Mountain News, where he began as executive sports editor. He is the author of 16 books, nine of them sports-related. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.