Obituary Written for U.S. Race Walking? Or Can Americans Return to Olympics?

Once upon a time, the future of American race walking looked bright. Olympic medals beckoned at the end of a rainbow beginning in Chula Vista.

In 1997, the ARCO Olympic Training Center — as it was then known — became a Mecca for America’s best male walkers. And thanks to funding from the North American Racewalking Institute, a top-notch coach was hired: Enrique Peña.

Under Peña’s guidance, Team USA sent a slew of 20K and 50K race walkers to the Games.

“We had a good top group of guys — 1999 represented our fastest national championships ever,” with three breaking the 1-hour, 25-minute barrier at 20 kilometers, and “like six guys or something under 1:27,” said one walk expert.

At the 2000 Athens Games, the U.S. was represented by four walkers, including current Cuyamaca College coach Tim Seaman. In 2004, Seaman competed again at the 20K distance, with four walking teammates.

But 2024? Nothing going.

No male or female walkers — or a team in the new marathon race walk mixed relay — will compete in Paris for Team USA.

In a cruel joke of misunderstanding, hundreds of stories appeared online saying 58-year-old Michelle Rohl, a three-time Olympian, would return to the Games as a 20K walker.

“We tried to correct it early, but it just went wild,” husband Michael Rohl told me Monday.

His wife had finished third at the Olympic Trials — normally a ticket to the Games — but her time of 1:42:26 was well off the Paris women’s qualifying standard of 1:29:20.

And none of the top three, including runner-up Miranda Melville of Chula Vista, were close. Robyn Stevens won in 1:37:37.

A silent scream went up from West Long Branch, New Jersey, where 90-year-old Olympian Elliott Denman follows his favorite sport.

“It’s just awful,” said Denman, 11th in the 1956 Melbourne Games 50K walk. “This is the first time in Olympic history there will be no USA race walkers in the Games.”

Also sounding the alarm was Alan Abrahamson, who wrote a scathing 1,600-word essay.

“If track and field were a ‘family,’ race walk in the United States would be that kid hidden in the closet under the stairs,” he wrote. “Sorry, no magic.”

Abrahamson urged that “planning and purpose for LA 2028 and beyond needs to start — now. … In classic American fashion, if this were a corporation, someone would figure out how to fix this, and fast, and that’s what ought to happen.”

But the problem is decades old.

In 2004, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith profiled race walker Al Heppner, who committed suicide by jumping off Interstate 8’s tall Pine Valley bridge in East County after failing to make the Olympic team at 50K. (He took fifth in a Chula Vista Trials.)

Smith wrote: “Bob Costas, NBC’s Olympics host, would say that having a race to see who can walk the fastest is like having a contest to see who can whisper the loudest.”

Making fun of the heel-toe sport — where athletes have to visibly (but not actually) stay in contact with the ground at all times — isn’t the event’s biggest concern.

I surveyed a half-dozen leading walk authorities — including coaches, officials and athletes — to learn why the life of American race walking is hanging by a thread.

Some asked that I not use their names, given their roles in the sport.

USA Track & Field, the sport’s governing body, wouldn’t respond to my inquiries, and neither did the chair of the USATF Race Walking Committee, Diane Graham-Henry.

But here’s what I learned.

Field Sizes Shrink

“While the absence of USA race walkers from the Olympics is disappointing, one has to take it in context,” said coach and international official Jeff Salvage.

He said a primary reason is the smaller field size at the Games. Where 65 once walked in the 12.3-mile race, now it’s 48. And making the qualifying standard of 1:20:10 would require one to crush Seaman’s American record of 1:22:02 dating to 2004.

Coach and author Dave McGovern, who competed in 10 Olympic Trials, said everybody knew that there was nothing on the line at the recent 20K race in Springfield, Oregon.

“I mean, yeah, we didn’t have a chance of any anybody male or female making the 20K,” he said. “Nobody was in the top 100” of the world rankings — another means of qualifying for Paris.

McGovern echoes experts who think World Athletics, the sport’s overseer, is trying to kill walking.

“This whole marathon relay was just thrown together,” he said. “What they decided in Tokyo (in 2021) is well, we don’t have time to add a woman’s 50K.”

Then a two times 35K [relay] was considered, he said, but in April 2023, “they decided to pull the rug out and say we’re going to do this marathon relay.”

One walker told me: “We’re never sure if the walk is going to be in the next Olympics. … The relay’s not coming back next year for Tokyo,” the world championships site. “It’s turning back into a 35K.”

The same walker bemoaned the lack of development — but didn’t blame the USATF Race Walking Committee.

Money for event growth comes out of the USATF High Performance Division, the walker said, which he called a “budget cruncher” that looks at a “whole host of different things.”

“Like: Does [diverting money from other events] hurt our medal chances and then you know, how much money are we going to get out of this?” the walker said.

“It could be so minuscule — how much more money they actually get out of one extra medal but then they destroy a whole system.”

A marathon-relay team of El Cajon’s Nick Christie and Robyn Stevens went to Turkey in April to seek a top-22 finish at the world walk team championships and secure a place in the Paris Olympic field.

They were 41st in a field of 64 finishers. But after excluding all but the top two teams from each nation, they took 26th. Any chance they’d have of making the 25-team field at Paris was lost when three teams got in thanks to faster times.

On June 2, at a Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center meet, Christie teamed with fellow New York Athletic Club member Melville to lower the American record in the marathon relay event to 3:08:57.

But at a Dublin, Ireland, event June 22, Czechia landed the 25th and last Paris spot with a 3:02:09.

Santee race-walk organizer Tracy Sundlun — who helped create the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon Series — says race walk leaders “shot themselves in the damn foot by having the most stupid distances imaginable in this day and age.”

Instead of a 50K — 31 miles — the event should have been the standard 26.2-mile marathon, he said.

“I mean when I tell somebody that that 4-hour 50K guy … went by the marathon under three hours and then picked it up for five miles, [people say] ‘You’re f—-g kidding me.'”

Sundlun said he once gave a trinket from the Olympic Training Center to every marathon runner who beat the first walker.

He laughed. “Out of a thousand runners, ya know a couple of hundred” beat the walker.

In fact, the World Athletics Road Running Championships set for September 2025 in Balboa Park will feature prize-money walking events at standard running distances. Sundlun is helping organize that event.

Weak Feeder System

Also back in the day, several states contested shorter walks — like a mile or 5K — in high school. Notably Maine and New York.

But New York walks have dwindled — with girls losing their state meet chances years before the boys in 2000. Maine continues to have a mile walk state championship for boys and girls.

Salvage, a major promoter of the sport, points to efforts to reinstate the race walk in New York high schools.

“In the past [about] half the national team would come out of that program,” he said. “With its addition, USA race walking would be on a path for much greater success.”

But NCAA schools shun race-walk scholarships, with only Division 2 University of Wisconsin-Parkside with a history of catering to walkers under coach Mike DeWitt. (Michelle Rohl, a Parkside grad, is still coached by DeWitt.)

Only the small-school NAIA has a walk program — contesting the 5,000-meter event. Parkside once was an NAIA school.)

“Thank heavens the NAIA embraces race walking,” said Olympian Denman. “Without it, we’d be in far worse shape,” noting that Canada boasts past NAIA champion Evan Dunfee, 50K bronze medal winner at the Tokyo Games.

Sundlun said he once created something called the New York Amateur Sports Alliance to promote a “whole bunch of Olympic sports” in high schools.

Pushing the race walk, he and others went to school districts and said: “Hey, you don’t have our sport in school.”

Despite experiments showing the popularity of the race walk in grade and middle schools, Sundlun had few takers.

“It should have been a high school sport in every state,” he said, noting that it’s “a whole lot easier to coach than the triple jump, the pole vault and the hammer throw.”

New Jersey’s Denman bemoaned the fact the USATF under-20 and Junior Olympic meets provide excellent racing opportunities for kids, “but there is no feeder system to support these events, and fields are usually small.”

Other nations have cradle-to-grave programs and fully embrace the event, including Latin American countries, and many in Europe and Asia.

“Even Kenya and Ethiopia now produce fast race walkers,” Denman said via email. “We surely need a Natonal Racewalking Academy or Training Camp” as once modeled by the ARCO center in Chula Vista.

He called the current crop of U.S. walkers “a terrific and valiant group. But it’s clear that Team USA race walking needs a whole lot of help.”

(In fact, a U.S. citizen will walk 20K in Paris — Puerto Rico’s Rachelle De Orbeta, 24. The International Olympic Committee has deemed Puerto Rico’s national Olympic committee a separate entity from that of the U.S. since 1948.)

The last two American Olympians in the walk — Christie and Stevens — finished 50th and 33rd, respectively, at the 2021 Tokyo Games.

In his critique, Abrahamson wrote that Christie’s Trials victory was his 33rd national title.

“This means that over the years the United States has arguably produced no serious challenger,” he wrote. “If he is the best this country has, finished 50th in Tokyo, and didn’t qualify this year, what — as a business proposition — would that logically suggest about investing resources in him toward international medal prospects going forward? He would be 36 in 2028.”

Aging Up and Out

Another wrinkle in the decline of American race walking is the age of its top adherents.

On the women’s side, Stevens is 41. Melville is 35. An after grandmother Rohl came Katie Burnett, 35.

(Abrahamson quoted Stevens as saying the Trials race might be her last “as a full-time athlete … focused on Olympic training and stuff.”)

At the Trials, fifth-placer Stephanie Casey race-walked at age 40. And sixth was Lydia McGranahan, 47. Celina Lepe, in seventh, was the first under-30 racer. She’s 28.

A teen — two-time national champion Talia Green — took eighth at the June 29 Olympic Trials.

“Her time [of 1:51:04] was still pretty slow,” one expert told me. “But she’s 18. So like she’s got time to develop and she’s still learning the event.”

On the men’s side, Trials winner Christie is 32, runner-up Emmanuel Corvera is 31 and third-placer Jordan Crawford is 24. Back in 14th place: Two-time Olympian Allen James. He’s 60.

Coach Salvage says “our future isn’t all doom and gloom,” however.

“We have a few young, very promising walkers in [teens] Heather Durrant and Angelica Harris,” he said. “They recently finished 22nd and 24th, respectfully, at the U20 10K in the World Team Championships.”

Besides Green, he said, “up and coming walkers Jason Cherng and Jordan Crawford are looking to break out by the next Olympiad.”

He said the sport is evolving with the advent of electronic methods of detecting loss of contact.

“This change may impact the distances contested and open a wealth of new opportunities,” Salvage said. “There is also movement to reinstate the race walk in NY high schools.”

In the past, he said, about half the national team came out of New York schools.

“With its addition,” he said, “USA race walking would be on a path for much greater success.”

Race walking evolved from 18th-century England, “when footmen who walked astride the carriages of their aristocratic bosses began to travel the country like prizefighters taking up challenges,” noted a New York Times account.

“Their long-distance walking feats become known as pedestrianism.”

So American sports authorities face a question: Is the sport merely pedestrian or an investment-worthy showcase for athletic feats?