PARIS — Three summers ago, Freddie Crittenden walked out of Hayward Field convinced that he’d never run another hurdles race.
He had grown tired of working multiple jobs and struggling to pay bills while chasing a dream that stayed just out of reach.
As an unsponsored athlete, Crittenden received no annual salary. He paid for his own spikes, gear, coaching and travel expenses. He lost money pursuing professional track and field even though his fastest times in the 110-meter hurdles were only a couple tenths of a second shy of what Olympic medalists were running.
Crittenden stayed afloat by scrambling to find side jobs that didn’t disrupt his workout schedule. At first, he worked at a Gamestop store greeting customers and answering questions. He later dabbled in coaching and substitute teaching, restocked shelves at a warehouse and made deliveries for Uber Eats.
The expenses piled up for Crittenden when COVID-19 wiped out the 2020 season and lingering hamstring injuries prevented him from training or racing for most of 2021. He showed up to the 2021 U.S. Olympic Trials in a hopeless position, ill-prepared to compete yet desperate for a breakthrough.
“I was broke,” he said. “The injury was not getting better as quickly as I thought it would and life was hitting too. The bills were hitting.”
Crittenden finished a distant sixth in his semifinal heat and failed to advance to the 110 hurdles final. Afterward, he knelt down and planted a kiss on the Hayward Field track.
“I was saying goodbye,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t do this anymore.”
At that time, he had no idea the joyride he'd have missed had he stuck with that decision. He didn't know that three years later, at age 29, he'd be standing on the very same track celebrating running the second-fastest time in the world to make his first U.S. Olympic team.
Side hustling to pay the bills
Freddie Crittenden chuckles when he remembers how naive he once was about the economic realities of professional track and field. The two-time first-team all-American at Syracuse assumed that sponsors would still be lining up to sign him even after a pulled hamstring denied him the chance to compete for the NCAA 110 hurdles crown as a senior.
The harsh truth was that there was no market for hurdlers who never finished higher than fourth at NCAAs and whose top collegiate times were fast but not quite world-class. Shoe-apparel giants reserved their sponsorship money for teen phenoms and Olympic medal contenders. Meet organizers saved appearance fees for athletes who were bigger draws.
Luckily for Crittenden, he had a mentor who understood his plight because he himself had lived through it. Jarret Eaton, another former All-American hurdler at Syracuse, taught Crittenden to find side jobs that were compatible with his training and meet schedule, to budget for dry spells when he wasn’t winning races and to stretch prize money for months rather than quickly blowing through it.
"I tried to help Freddie understand that it's extremely difficult," Eaton told Yahoo Sports. "There are so many stories of athletes who have made an Olympic team and are still struggling — like, legitimately struggling, living below the poverty line."
Crittenden, ever the optimist, set out to become the rare unsponsored athlete who overcomes the odds and bushwhacks his way to the top of the sport. In August 2018, he relocated to the Phoenix area, moved into a house with some of his new training partners and began working with coach Tim O’Neil.
The following season, Crittenden lowered his personal-best to 13.17 seconds and came within one hundredth of a second of qualifying for the World Championships. He became increasingly confident that 2020 would be his breakthrough year, that he’d punch his ticket to the Tokyo Olympics and finally attain the security of a sponsorship.
Then COVID hit.
So did hamstring strains in both his legs.
Pretty soon, the Olympics had slipped away.
Tor Crittenden, his then-fiancee and now-wife, said that the frustration of not being able to train consistently for nine months plunged her husband-to-be into a “dark headspace.” Freddie told Tor after Olympic Trials that he was tired of unpaid bills piling up and that it might be time for him to pursue his passions outside of track and field.
"Maybe this sport just ain’t for me,” Freddie would say. “I am ready to be done.”
Each time, Tor tried to listen patiently, ask questions and offer unconditional support.
“When it comes to his decision of when to be done with track, I've always taken a backseat,” Tor told Yahoo Sports. “I don't want him to look back and be like, ‘I feel like this was your decision.’ So I try to let him figure out what makes the most sense for him.”
Though Tor was in law school at the time, she picked up more photography jobs on the side to ease Freddie's financial burden. He, too, began pursuing videography and took on a bigger role at a Phoenix non-profit that provides after-school programs for at-risk youths.
The final nudge to keep pursuing track came from Eaton and Crittenden’s other Phoenix Track Club training partners. When Crittenden admitted he still had passion for hurdling, they encouraged him to give his hamstrings time to fully heal and then go see how much pop in his legs he had left.
“He was dead serious about hanging it up at that moment, but I'm glad he didn’t,” Eaton said. “I'm glad that he ended up persevering, that whatever internal flame he had wasn't all the way extinguished.”
Healthy and reinvigorated, Crittenden quickly left no doubt that he’d made the right decision. He lowered his personal-best time to a blazing 13.0 seconds in 2022. He made his first World Championships team last year and placed fourth in Budapest.
Those successes, Tor Crittenden said, infused her husband with newfound confidence.
“You could see on his face,” she said, “that he was like, ‘I deserve to be here.’”
Crittenden the anomaly
In late June, three years after he kissed track and field goodbye, Crittenden returned to Hayward Field for Olympic Trials with something to prove.
The late-blooming 29-year-old wanted to show the major shoe companies who still overlooked him that they were making a mistake.
After Crittenden cruised to victory in one of three semifinal heats, a reporter asked if he still felt people were counting him out ahead of the final. “People have been counting me out for a long time,” Crittenden answered, pointing out that the only support he received was Tracksmith paying for his lodging during Trials and providing him a uniform to wear during the meet.
“That’s because people don’t believe in me,” Crittenden said. “They say, ‘He’s not going to make the team. He’s not good enough.’ And I’m sick of that. I know I deserve to be here. I know I belong. I know I’m good enough to be here. And it’s time to show everybody.”
The Olympic Trials final featured four hurdlers sponsored by Adidas or Nike. Crittenden outran all but Grant Holloway, streaking across the finish line just behind the three-time world champion to secure his place on the U.S. Olympic team.
Chest still heaving, Crittenden trained his eyes on the Hayward Field scoreboard and shouted, “What do we got, baby? What do we got, baby?” He wanted to see if he’d eclipsed 13 seconds for the first time in his career.
Crittenden’s anticipation grew when the scoreboard revealed that Holloway’s winning time was 12.86 seconds. The gap between him and Holloway wasn’t more than a single stride, Crittendon thought to himself.
"Then when I saw the 12.93 next to my name, I was like, 'Whaaaat?'" Crittenden said with a grin. "It's just excitement in the purest form. You can't describe it."
Cheering from the Hayward Field stands was Eaton, the fellow Syracuse hurdler who became Crittenden’s training partner in Phoenix and the best man at his April 2022 wedding. Eaton viewed Crittenden qualifying for the Olympics as a triumph not just for his friend but for all unsponsored runners.
“If you really think about it, an unsponsored athlete making it to the Olympic Games is an anomaly,” Eaton said. "It's a bigger feat than anybody could ever imagine.
“The odds are so stacked against you. You're running against guys that have sponsorships and support coming in. They don't have to work three or four jobs just to cover the bills. They don’t have to worry about paying for their coach to get to a meet. They're not hoarding their money so that they can use it wisely throughout the year.”
Between the end of Olympic Trials and the start of the men’s 110 hurdles in Paris, a lot has happened to Crittenden.
His wife gave birth to their first child on July 17. He moved closer to at long last signing a sponsorship deal with a major shoe-apparel brand. And he suffered an ill-timed muscle aggravation right abductor on the eve of Sunday morning’s 110 hurdles prelims.
Crittenden purposely jogged through his heat in an effort not to further aggravate the injury. He intends to go all-out in the repechage round on Tuesday to make sure that he advances to the following day's semifinal.
“In a couple days, I think it will be feeling even better,” he said, “and I’ll be able to give it all I’ve got.”
Only 12 men have ever run the 110 hurdles faster than Crittenden did at Olympic Trials. Only Holloway has run faster than 12.93 seconds this year. Crittenden is likely to find himself on the medal podium in Paris if he can duplicate 12.93 seconds in the Olympic final.
Crittenden still has a picture of himself kissing the Hayward Field track on his phone, but he no longer looks at it very often. He says he’s “made a lot of progress and found a lot of happiness since then.”
When he punched his ticket to Paris earlier this summer, Crittenden wasn’t tempted to kiss the Hayward Field track a second time.
Said the 29-year-old, “I don’t have to kiss it goodbye for a long time.”
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