Alexis Holmes enjoys watching the video of Team USA’s win in the mixed 4×400-meter relay at last year’s World Championships in Hungary.
Holmes, a Cheshire Academy graduate from Hamden, was the anchor leg. Nobody expected her to beat Femke Bol, the anchor leg for the Netherlands who is one of the top sprinters in the world.
The announcers kept talking about Bol as Holmes – in her first World Championships – trailed her throughout the race.
“I would be shocked if Femke Bol gives up this lead,” one of the announcers said. “She has a lot left in the tank. United States trying to hang on. Bol looks very comfortable.”
And then Holmes, competing in her first World Championships, made her move. She passed Bol steps before the finish as Bol stumbled and fell and the U.S. not only won a gold medal but also set a world record of 3:08.80 in the event, which has two female and two male runners.
A year later, Holmes will represent the U.S. once again, this time on arguably a bigger stage, at the Paris Olympic Games, which begin Friday with the Opening Ceremony .
Holmes, 24, will run the 400 meters and the 4×400 relay.
Last August at the World Championships, Holmes dispelled any doubts that she belonged on the big stage.
“Femke was one of the most talked-about athletes going in and I was just coming onto the scene so a lot of people didn’t know who I was,” Holmes said from Fayetteville, Ark. where she trains, last Friday. “‘Nobody can beat Femke, she’s unbeatable’ – but I have an underdog mentality sometimes.
“When you watch the video of the race you can hear the announcer saying, ‘Oh, Femke, nobody’s going to catch her.’ I love watching myself say like, ‘No, I’m just as good, just as talented and I can do this too.’
“I think I’m making a name for myself, for sure.”
Holmes is doing just that. She has been a professional runner for almost two years now after graduating from the University of Kentucky . She had another come-from-behind finish at the Olympic Trials in June to capture the third and final U.S. spot in the 400 meters.
Her mother Dawn Stanton, who was an All-American track athlete at Southern Connecticut, couldn’t go to Eugene because she had just had surgery, so she was home in Hamden watching her daughter on TV.
Holmes was in fifth place coming around the final turn and picked off two runners in the final 100 meters to finish in a personal best 49.78 seconds.
“I was absolutely freaking out,” Stanton said. “I had two girlfriends come over. I usually sit alone but they came over at the last minute…. but yeah, I was freaking out. It looked like she was getting out slow. She’s got this really, really long stride so sometimes it looks too relaxed even though she’s moving. It did not surprise me because it’s not the first time I’ve seen Alexis push through like that at the end.
“I said to her, ‘Girl, you gotta stop doing that to me, because my heart can’t take it.’”
Holmes excelled at many sports when she was younger and her parents thought that basketball would be the one after she got her first Division I scholarship offer in eighth grade. But her sophomore year at Cheshire Academy, Holmes realized that she wasn’t passionate about basketball anymore and that track would be her sport. She wrote a letter to her parents telling them why she was giving up basketball.
“It threw us for a loop,” Stanton said. “But she set a goal, she had a vision for herself.
“She saw it before anybody else and she put the plan into motion. We rolled with it to support her in any way we can. It turns out she was right.”
Holmes won the national championship in the 400 meters her senior year in high school before going to Penn State. She later transferred to Kentucky, but the pandemic and an injury set her back.
“There was a lot of things that kind of came into play,” Holmes said. “I did have an injury that set me back in college for about 13 months. I was also struggling with my mental health in college, too. I think once I finished school, I was just done with running collegiately.”
She was an All-American at Kentucky and her 4×400 relay team finished third indoors at NCAAs and she was fourth in the 400 indoors her senior year.
“Her senior year of college, she did OK, but coming out of the injury, some of the big meets toward the end, she didn’t have her strongest performances,” Stanton said. “So going into her pro career, I guess she might have had something to prove – although I don’t know if that’s the way she would express that.
“The past year and a half, almost two years now, she’s been learning what it means to be a pro and a lot of that is this huge transformation of your body.”
Said Holmes: “I knew I had the potential and talent to be a professional and I think I’ve been doing a lot better in a professional environment where you’re not dealing with day-to-day of college; it’s a lot more individualized and I think that works better for me.”
After college, Holmes said she didn’t doubt where she was going with her pro career, but she said sometimes she got caught up in comparing her journey to others’.
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“My first year as a pro, I had a lot of success, but I was going through a transitional period where I was trying to get used to the workouts, a lot of other things,” she said. “I had to lose 30 pounds in my first year as a pro, other things like that that people don’t necessarily know about, but I had to do my own journey, just kind of believing in myself, trust in the process – it kind of came to fruition at the World Championships.
“I think making the (Olympic) team this year, I feel mentally, physically and spiritually prepared and ready so maybe this is how it was supposed to work out.”
And now she’s going to Paris. Holmes will be leaving Thursday and will compete in the qualifying rounds of the 400 Aug. 5. The finals of the 400 are Aug. 9.
“My goal, of course, is to win,” she said. “I just want to go out there and be the best version of Alexis, whatever that looks like. I don’t want to leave Paris with any regret. That’s my goal: Be the best version of Alexis and hopefully leave with some hardware.”
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