Hanover’s Sarah True has had almost a year to prepare for the excitement that’s about to envelop her at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. She’s only had a couple of days to put aside nearly as deep a disappointment.
A world-class triathlete, True spent last weekend at the University of Oregon watching her Dartmouth College graduate husband, Ben, compete in the men’s 5,000-meter run at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Since qualifying for her own event last August, the former Middlebury College dual major held a vision of having Ben beside her in Rio, husband and wife both relishing the competition and experience.
Ben True missed a Rio invitation by a half-second in the 5K final on Saturday night. Now, with about three weeks to the start of the Games in Brazil and about a month until her event on Copacabana Beach, Sarah True still confronts a mix of emotions.
“The benefit, positively and negatively, of being an athlete married to an athlete is you know exactly how it feels to be really, agonizingly close to something that would change someone’s life,” she said on Tuesday during a pre-Olympics media teleconference.
“You feel it personally, feel it viscerally. To see Ben just be a half-second short of achieving something he’s worked for for decades … I don’t know exactly how he feels, but I can imagine being in a similar position.”
In effect, she has.
Then known as Sarah Groff — the two married 21 months ago — True admitted she approached her first Olympics, in London four years back, just happy to be there. She performed well, however, missing out on a bronze medal by just 10 seconds over a two-hour race.
A lot has changed since then, from both goal-setting and training standpoints.
“When I finished a very close fourth, it made me realize that I was a potential medallist,” True said. “It reframed how I saw myself as an athlete. The last four years, I’ve been training to be in the medal mix in Rio.”
Last August proved True’s case. The 34-year-old True, who was born in Hanover but spent much of her childhood in Cooperstown, N.Y., earned a spot on the three-woman U.S. Olympic triathlon team with a fourth-place finish — and second among Americans — at a Rio test event. Gwen Jorgensen (38th at London) won the race to get an automatic bid; USA Triathlon named Katie Zaferes as the third member of the squad in May.
True favors the system. Having secured Rio a long time ago, it gave her a year to concentrate on training to peak at the Olympics, rather than having to endure the last-event-before-Brazil circus her husband and other track athletes undergo.
“It gives you time to process qualifying, to have a nice offseason and then slowly and gradually build into peak fitness for the Olympic Games,” she said. “Some athletes have a really high level of competition throughout the year. I do well with one specific peak.”
Because of that, True has cut back on her competitive schedule this year, participating in just five ITU World Triathlon Series events this year, half of what she did in 2015. She most recently took sixth at Stockholm, a race she’d won the past two years, in her final tune-up for Rio.
Her immediate post-Oregon schedule reflected the short amount of time she has to cope with her husband’s disappointment. Once the weekend ended, True headed back to Flagstaff, Ariz., for more high-altitude training as part of her Brazil preparations.
In True, Jorgensen and Zaferes, the United States has three triathletes capable of medaling. True said she’s ready to set her mind on Rio; Oregon is going to have to bury itself somewhere else in her psyche for now.
“He was incredibly close; you have to be proud of somebody for that,” she said of Ben’s close call. “I’m incredibly proud of him for his preparations and the way he raced. It was going to be an emotional experience. It’s still pretty raw for both of us. …
“As a professional athlete, you live with an optimistic lens on the world. You’re mentally in this space where you think the best-case scenario will always happen. To be a successful athlete, you also have to be flexible. So when things don’t go the way you’d hoped and dreamed, you have to turn things around pretty quickly.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.
Correction
Hanover’s Sarah True, who will compete in the women’s triathlon at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next month, was born in Hanover but raised for much of her childhood in Cooperstown, N.Y. True’s birthplace was misidentified in an earlier version of this story.