One Of Track’s All-Time Greats Found
New Home Coaching With UAC
A DyeStat story by Dave Devine
Union AC photos by Tim Healy
“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples, widening out from an original center.”
– Seamus Heaney (Paris Review interview, Fall 1997)
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It’s been more than two years since the big move.
The Tokyo Olympic Games, an initial focus when Sonia O’Sullivan left her adopted home of Melbourne, Australia, in April 2021 to become an assistant coach for a then-unnamed Nike training group, have come and gone.
The 2022 World Athletics Championships, held just down the road from O’Sullivan’s new home in Portland, Oregon, are in the past as well.
Another world championship looms this summer, Budapest this time.
There have been training blocks and altitude camps and European summer meets and national championships — all in the rearview mirror.
Several times over.
Twenty-six months since the legendary Irish distance runner agreed to come to the United States to accept an admittedly vague coaching role without knowing “fully what it was about,” and in some ways, she’s still trying to figure that out.
So many things have changed.
That training group, which was resurrected — at least in part — from the fragments of Alberto Salazar’s disbanded Nike Oregon Project and is headed by onetime NOP assistant Pete Julian, received a name about eight months after O’Sullivan joined the staff — dubbed the Union Athletics Club in December 2021.
The team’s roster has shifted and turned since O’Sullivan’s arrival; original members retired or moved on, talented newcomers taking their place.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which hung so heavily over everything from O’Sullivan’s decision to leave Melbourne to the complexities of safe competition, has receded, at least to a point where it no longer impacts every aspect of daily life.
O’Sullivan’s daughter, Sophie (left, photo by Micah Thornton), a first-year recruit finding her way at the University of Washington when O’Sullivan first considered the job, is now a standout junior, newly-minted school record-holder and NCAA finalist at 1,500 meters.
Two years on, and so many changes.
But one thing that hasn’t changed — from her days as a distance star traveling the circuit to her current vocation mentoring post-collegians — is this: the simple joy of finding a quiet coffee shop.
The familiarity of the local place. The tucked-away…
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