Thirty years after competing in the Olympic Trials, this CT woman finally got her gold medal on a world stage

Almost 30 years after she retired from competition, Bonnie Edmondson finally got her gold medal on a world stage.

In 1992, Edmondson, of Coventry, competed in the hammer throw at the U.S Olympic Trials. She finished third, but it was an exhibition event. The women’s hammer was not part of the Olympics.

After Edmondson retired from competition in 1997, she worked to get the hammer into the Games and in 2000 it was contested in the Olympics for the first time.

Edmondson coached the Olympic team in 2016 and multiple world championship teams but never got a chance to compete herself – until she decided to pick up her hammer again last year before she turned 60.

She would train and she would go to the world championships. Her goal was to win.

Monday, she did exactly that in the hammer in her age group (60-64) at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Sweden, despite injuring her leg the day before. Tuesday, she won silver in the weight throw, which is a heavier weight with a smaller handle.

“I was thrilled with how things worked out,” said Edmondson, who coaches the throwers at Trinity College . “It’s an honor and a privilege to represent our country and be on the world stage. It was all I hoped for and dreamed for when I was on the podium.”

When Edmondson was in her prime, she was ranked 20th in the world. She went to Eastern Connecticut State University, where she was an All-American discus and hammer thrower back in the days when there were few women competing in the hammer. She was a national champion in 1990 and ’91 and finished third in the ’92 Trials and ninth at the ’96 Trials.

Upon retirement from competition, she became an advocate for the sport. Edmondson worked for the state Department of Education, where she became a nationally known speaker on health and education policy and was a professor at Southern Connecticut.

But as her coach Bill Sutherland put it, Edmondson had “unfinished business.” She started to think about competing again last year and realized she needed to do a lot of work. So she started to train intensively.

In July, she won the gold in her age group at the USA Track and Field national masters championships in Sacramento.

But a medal at the world championships wouldn’t be easy. The night before her competition, Edmondson was warming up in the hotel hallway when she heard something pop in her right calf and felt intense pain. She couldn’t bear weight on her right foot. She went to the trainers’ room and got some treatment and went back the next morning before she was supposed to compete.

“I was trying to stay positive, not getting too upset about things and thinking that somehow it would work out,” Edmondson said. “I was thinking, ‘OK, I can still hardly put pressure on my right foot,’ and the hammer throw is all about your right side and using the right side to accelerate the ball.”

She experimented with putting the weight on the ball of her right foot and that felt better.

“I said, ‘Oh, I can do this,’” she said. “I adjusted my technique a little bit. Then my mindset changed.

“It was pretty amazing. I’m limping. I couldn’t put pressure on my foot. Then I step in the circle and something just clicked and I just went after it.”

She made it to the finals and on her last throw, had a personal best of 41.73 meters, or almost 137 feet, to win.

“On my last throw I had no doubt,” she said. “I stepped in and let it fly and everything kind of came together. I only imagined how far I could have thrown if I could have had my right side engaged.

“Then I had to wait for two more throwers behind me to realize I had indeed won gold. It was an incredible feeling.”