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Olympic memories
worth their weight in gold
 |
| Lake City's Jimbo Haley participated in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona as a member of the U.S. pentathlon team. His wife, Henni, won a gold medal in the vault and took silver in the floor exercise as a gymnast on the Hungarian team. The pair recently opened Olympic Health Chiropractic in Lake City. JASON MATTHEW WALKER/Lake City Reporter |
Lake City man recalls long road to Barcelona in 1992.
By CHRIS WHITE
cwhite@lakecityreporter.com
The swimming and running came naturally to Lake City’s Jimbo Haley.
The shooting wasn’t far behind.
“I grew up in Lake City, so I was definitely familiar with guns,” Jimbo joked.
And the rest of the events in what is known as the
modern pentathlon — fencing and horseback riding — were an afterthought.
“I followed it since I was
probably 9 years old, and I just decided I wanted to do that,” said Jimbo, who recently opened the aptly named Olympic Health Chiropractic practice in Lake City. “I wanted to be in the Olympics.”
The event — rarely seen outside of the Olympics — is a soldier’s competition. It was designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games.
In battle, a soldier or
messenger might have to ride an unfamiliar horse, shoot an enemy, fight with a sword, swim across a river and run. In the Olympics, an athlete has to shoot a 4.5 mm air pistol at a stationary target 10 meters away from a standing position, fence through a round-robin competition, swim a 200-meter freestyle race, ride a horse through a 350- to 450-meter jumping course and engage in a foot race through a
three-kilometer course.
The sport was designed to exhibit the skills of a cavalry man, but Jimbo characterized it as a “man versus beast, man versus man and man versus self.”
“It really is a tough sport because you’re competing against all the elements,” Jimbo said. “Some of it you can control, and some of it you can’t. That’s what I really like about it.”
Aquatic tendencies
Jimbo said he was swimming as long as he could remember, and aside from setting records at the pool, he also opened new doors for other swimmers in the community when he became the first member of the Columbia High swim team as a freshman.
“There weren’t a lot of people interested the first few years — actually, I was the only
swimmer the first year,” said Jimbo, who specialized in the 500-meter freestyle and 200-meter freestyle and individual medley events.
He didn’t need a team to support him. Jimbo made it to the state competition the three years he swam for CHS, and his extracurricular activities included
training daily for his role on the AAU swim team, organized through The Bolles School in Jacksonville, which was then headed up by current University of Florida and Olympic swim coach Gregg Troy.
It was then, Jimbo said, his training regiment began to shape him into a serious athlete.
“It was tough at times,” Jimbo said of his routine. “During the school year,
I’d train two times a day
and do running and
weightlifting.”
Mornings were often reserved for swimming
or running, usually for
about an hour and a half, and then it was on to
class. In the afternoon, it was back to the pool or the track, and an hour of weightlifting was fit in three times a week.
It was during his time as a Columbia and Bolles
swimmer that Jimbo took interest in an Olympic development clinic in
San Antonio, Texas, which was then home to the U.S. Olympic Team’s pentathlon program. The Lake City native had never
ridden a horse competitively, and had never fenced, but he was asked to
return to the training
center as an Olympic
hopeful after the three-week clinic.
“At the end of the clinic, I did the junior nationals
competition and got
second,” Jimbo said. “I just picked it up like that, and they asked me to come back and train.
“I could be an Olympian, they told me, so I went.”
The next step
Making the next level as a pentathlon participant meant moving to the sport’s headquarters in
San Antonio. Jimbo’s
parents blessed the move, which forced their son to attend a different high school for his senior year while taking on serious training responsibilities more than 1,000 miles from home.
“I think my parents knew that I saw something
bigger,” Jimbo said. “They knew I wanted to do
something like this, and they wanted me to do it.”
He attended Clark High School and began a heavy schedule of running, swimming, shooting, horseback riding and fencing that included at least two
sessions each day sandwiching his classes. Practices often ran between 40 and 50 hours a week.
The training began to pay off almost immediately. Jimbo made the World Team in 1987, his senior year, and in 1988 and 1989. He made the Goodwill Games in 1990.
But it was not making the cut in one of the final events of 1991 that
motivated Jimbo to find a way to Barcelona.
“To make these teams, you had to compete against a bunch of other athletes, and you had to do well in all five events at a qualifying competition,” Jimbo said. “I did really well in four of the five events, but I messed up in the riding. I missed the spot on the team — I was fifth and only the top four make it — and that’s when I said, ‘OK, I have to really do this.’
“So the very next day I started training for the Olympic games.”
Home team support
It was also about
making a choice. Jimbo had already been accepted to the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. But after weighing his options after high school, he decided to go with his gut after a little reassurance from back home.
“I called my mom and she just asked me, ‘Is this what you want?’” Jimbo said. “I told her it was and she said to do it then.”
Jimbo was a more
natural shot than most of his fellow American Olympic hopefuls, and his swimming and running were near the top of the bunch, too. So he started riding every day and when the final Olympic qualifying competition took place in Ocala on Mother’s Day in 1992, he was prepared. He hoped to at least make the top four, where he might have to be an alternate, but instead secured the No. 3 spot and a guaranteed trip to the Mediterranean city.
That, Jimbo said, was the most difficult and nerve-wracking event of his
athletic career. The Olympic games were laid back and relaxed compared to the competition in the
qualifying rounds.
“Once you get there, you never felt so good,” Jimbo said. “It’s harder to get there than to win it, I think. That’s the most pressure you can be under, and it felt pretty good to be done with it and know that no matter what, I was going to the Olympics.”
All that was left was to celebrate, but even that seemed difficult.
“My friend was down in Ocala to watch me, and we just drove around Ocala in my car afterwards,” he said. “That’s really all I could think to do.”
Road to Barcelona
Three days later, it was back to training and three days after that the team left for Europe, where it would compete in the World Cup and train by taking part in international competitions.
Jimbo placed first in a competition in Bucharest, and entered the Olympics ranked fourth in the world in the modern pentathlon.
The month before the Olympics was hardly comparable to a summer lounging in Europe, though. The team was running about 100 miles, swimming 15,000 to 20,000 meters, fencing for 12 hours, riding for eight hours and shooting six hours a week. And after a brief stay back in the United States, it was on to Barcelona, where the hardest mental training began.
“About two weeks out, I started thinking about the what ifs,” Jimbo said. “I didn’t want to concentrate on it, but I just ran over scenarios in my head and thought, what if?”
Other questions pop up, too. What separated one athlete from another? Why did Jimbo make the team, but his roommate and friend didn’t? Was it a bad day or a matter of luck?
“One of my best friends, Conrad Adams, finished right behind me trying to make the team, and I thought about that a lot,” Jimbo said, noting that there was no guilt or
resentment between the athletes. “He told me that he didn’t want to lose, but he didn’t mind losing to me. But who knows what
separates people in that situation?
“Was I more determined? Maybe. Or was I just lucky? I can’t say what it was.”
Long cool down
Jimbo eventually finished 25th overall and the
U.S. team took fourth — just 111 points shy of a medal.
And like many athletes, Jimbo said he felt lost after the games.
“I think most people just fall into a funk after the Olympics,” Jimbo said. “Some people, especially if they win a medal, they just go into a funk and don’t know what to do. All their plans ended there. They didn’t think about what to do the very next day. Their vision just ended there.”
Jimbo slipped and sprained his ankle outside of his room in the Olympic Village the day after
he finished competing and spent a couple days
rehabbing his ankle and enjoying the sights in Barcelona. Then he hit his bump in the road.
“I spent the next six months just wandering the world aimlessly,” Jimbo said. “Then I decided to just go back to college for a while.”
Jimbo now has degrees from Lake City Community College, the University of North Florida and the Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minn., but briefly reconsidered a return to the Olympics for the 1996 games in Atlanta before taking a gig with the World Olympians Association.
Jimbo began training under his old coach, Janusz Pyciak-Peciak, who became a U.S. coach after winning the individual gold medal in the pentathlon for Poland in the 1976 games in Montreal. But it was short-lived.
“I just ended up
working the Olympics behind the scenes with the WOA,” Jimbo said. “I knew I wanted to stay involved, and that was one way I could do it.”
In 1996, he worked the Atlanta games as a media advisor, explaining the
pentathlon to reporters and giving breakdowns of other athletes’ performances. He stayed on through the 2000 Sydney games and did the same in Salt Lake City in 2002.
Priorities change
The position also led to his marriage to Henni Onodi, a former Hungarian gymnast who won a gold medal in the vault and took silver in the floor exercise in 1992, and competed in Atlanta in 1996.
Henni had moved to San Antonio to attend the University of the Incarnate Word. She began volunteering at the pentathlon headquarters, which was still stationed there, and became close with Jimbo in 1994 while working events alongside him and through mutual friends.
“We just kept running into each other everywhere,” Henni said. “We worked a lot of events together, and we did so well as a team. Then I moved to Miami for a job with the WOA, and then Jimbo decided to go to school. I decided to go with him.”
The two later married and now have two children, Annabella, 2, and Sebastian, 1. But whether there will be another Olympian hailing from Lake City is unclear.
“We don’t know if they’ll be interested in that sort of thing, so we’ll just wait and see,” said Henni who grew up in Bekescsaba, a small town near the Hungarian border with Romania. “We’re never going to
pressure them to do
anything they don’t want to. You have to want to do something 100 percent to do it at that level.
“We want them to do whatever makes them happy, just like we did.”
The shooting wasn’t far behind.
“I grew up in Lake City, so I was definitely familiar with guns,” Jimbo joked.
And the rest of the events in what is known as the
modern pentathlon — fencing and horseback riding — were an afterthought.
“I followed it since I was
probably 9 years old, and I just decided I wanted to do that,” said Jimbo, who recently opened the aptly named Olympic Health Chiropractic practice in Lake City. “I wanted to be in the Olympics.”
The event — rarely seen outside of the Olympics — is a soldier’s competition. It was designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games.
In battle, a soldier or
messenger might have to ride an unfamiliar horse, shoot an enemy, fight with a sword, swim across a river and run. In the Olympics, an athlete has to shoot a 4.5 mm air pistol at a stationary target 10 meters away from a standing position, fence through a round-robin competition, swim a 200-meter freestyle race, ride a horse through a 350- to 450-meter jumping course and engage in a foot race through a
three-kilometer course.
The sport was designed to exhibit the skills of a cavalry man, but Jimbo characterized it as a “man versus beast, man versus man and man versus self.”
“It really is a tough sport because you’re competing against all the elements,” Jimbo said. “Some of it you can control, and some of it you can’t. That’s what I really like about it.”
Aquatic tendencies
Jimbo said he was swimming as long as he could remember, and aside from setting records at the pool, he also opened new doors for other swimmers in the community when he became the first member of the Columbia High swim team as a freshman.
“There weren’t a lot of people interested the first few years — actually, I was the only
swimmer the first year,” said Jimbo, who specialized in the 500-meter freestyle and 200-meter freestyle and individual medley events.
He didn’t need a team to support him. Jimbo made it to the state competition the three years he swam for CHS, and his extracurricular activities included
training daily for his role on the AAU swim team, organized through The Bolles School in Jacksonville, which was then headed up by current University of Florida and Olympic swim coach Gregg Troy.
It was then, Jimbo said, his training regiment began to shape him into a serious athlete.
“It was tough at times,” Jimbo said of his routine. “During the school year,
I’d train two times a day
and do running and
weightlifting.”
Mornings were often reserved for swimming
or running, usually for
about an hour and a half, and then it was on to
class. In the afternoon, it was back to the pool or the track, and an hour of weightlifting was fit in three times a week.
It was during his time as a Columbia and Bolles
swimmer that Jimbo took interest in an Olympic development clinic in
San Antonio, Texas, which was then home to the U.S. Olympic Team’s pentathlon program. The Lake City native had never
ridden a horse competitively, and had never fenced, but he was asked to
return to the training
center as an Olympic
hopeful after the three-week clinic.
“At the end of the clinic, I did the junior nationals
competition and got
second,” Jimbo said. “I just picked it up like that, and they asked me to come back and train.
“I could be an Olympian, they told me, so I went.”
The next step
Making the next level as a pentathlon participant meant moving to the sport’s headquarters in
San Antonio. Jimbo’s
parents blessed the move, which forced their son to attend a different high school for his senior year while taking on serious training responsibilities more than 1,000 miles from home.
“I think my parents knew that I saw something
bigger,” Jimbo said. “They knew I wanted to do
something like this, and they wanted me to do it.”
He attended Clark High School and began a heavy schedule of running, swimming, shooting, horseback riding and fencing that included at least two
sessions each day sandwiching his classes. Practices often ran between 40 and 50 hours a week.
The training began to pay off almost immediately. Jimbo made the World Team in 1987, his senior year, and in 1988 and 1989. He made the Goodwill Games in 1990.
But it was not making the cut in one of the final events of 1991 that
motivated Jimbo to find a way to Barcelona.
“To make these teams, you had to compete against a bunch of other athletes, and you had to do well in all five events at a qualifying competition,” Jimbo said. “I did really well in four of the five events, but I messed up in the riding. I missed the spot on the team — I was fifth and only the top four make it — and that’s when I said, ‘OK, I have to really do this.’
“So the very next day I started training for the Olympic games.”
Home team support
It was also about
making a choice. Jimbo had already been accepted to the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. But after weighing his options after high school, he decided to go with his gut after a little reassurance from back home.
“I called my mom and she just asked me, ‘Is this what you want?’” Jimbo said. “I told her it was and she said to do it then.”
Jimbo was a more
natural shot than most of his fellow American Olympic hopefuls, and his swimming and running were near the top of the bunch, too. So he started riding every day and when the final Olympic qualifying competition took place in Ocala on Mother’s Day in 1992, he was prepared. He hoped to at least make the top four, where he might have to be an alternate, but instead secured the No. 3 spot and a guaranteed trip to the Mediterranean city.
That, Jimbo said, was the most difficult and nerve-wracking event of his
athletic career. The Olympic games were laid back and relaxed compared to the competition in the
qualifying rounds.
“Once you get there, you never felt so good,” Jimbo said. “It’s harder to get there than to win it, I think. That’s the most pressure you can be under, and it felt pretty good to be done with it and know that no matter what, I was going to the Olympics.”
All that was left was to celebrate, but even that seemed difficult.
“My friend was down in Ocala to watch me, and we just drove around Ocala in my car afterwards,” he said. “That’s really all I could think to do.”
Road to Barcelona
Three days later, it was back to training and three days after that the team left for Europe, where it would compete in the World Cup and train by taking part in international competitions.
Jimbo placed first in a competition in Bucharest, and entered the Olympics ranked fourth in the world in the modern pentathlon.
The month before the Olympics was hardly comparable to a summer lounging in Europe, though. The team was running about 100 miles, swimming 15,000 to 20,000 meters, fencing for 12 hours, riding for eight hours and shooting six hours a week. And after a brief stay back in the United States, it was on to Barcelona, where the hardest mental training began.
“About two weeks out, I started thinking about the what ifs,” Jimbo said. “I didn’t want to concentrate on it, but I just ran over scenarios in my head and thought, what if?”
Other questions pop up, too. What separated one athlete from another? Why did Jimbo make the team, but his roommate and friend didn’t? Was it a bad day or a matter of luck?
“One of my best friends, Conrad Adams, finished right behind me trying to make the team, and I thought about that a lot,” Jimbo said, noting that there was no guilt or
resentment between the athletes. “He told me that he didn’t want to lose, but he didn’t mind losing to me. But who knows what
separates people in that situation?
“Was I more determined? Maybe. Or was I just lucky? I can’t say what it was.”
Long cool down
Jimbo eventually finished 25th overall and the
U.S. team took fourth — just 111 points shy of a medal.
And like many athletes, Jimbo said he felt lost after the games.
“I think most people just fall into a funk after the Olympics,” Jimbo said. “Some people, especially if they win a medal, they just go into a funk and don’t know what to do. All their plans ended there. They didn’t think about what to do the very next day. Their vision just ended there.”
Jimbo slipped and sprained his ankle outside of his room in the Olympic Village the day after
he finished competing and spent a couple days
rehabbing his ankle and enjoying the sights in Barcelona. Then he hit his bump in the road.
“I spent the next six months just wandering the world aimlessly,” Jimbo said. “Then I decided to just go back to college for a while.”
Jimbo now has degrees from Lake City Community College, the University of North Florida and the Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minn., but briefly reconsidered a return to the Olympics for the 1996 games in Atlanta before taking a gig with the World Olympians Association.
Jimbo began training under his old coach, Janusz Pyciak-Peciak, who became a U.S. coach after winning the individual gold medal in the pentathlon for Poland in the 1976 games in Montreal. But it was short-lived.
“I just ended up
working the Olympics behind the scenes with the WOA,” Jimbo said. “I knew I wanted to stay involved, and that was one way I could do it.”
In 1996, he worked the Atlanta games as a media advisor, explaining the
pentathlon to reporters and giving breakdowns of other athletes’ performances. He stayed on through the 2000 Sydney games and did the same in Salt Lake City in 2002.
Priorities change
The position also led to his marriage to Henni Onodi, a former Hungarian gymnast who won a gold medal in the vault and took silver in the floor exercise in 1992, and competed in Atlanta in 1996.
Henni had moved to San Antonio to attend the University of the Incarnate Word. She began volunteering at the pentathlon headquarters, which was still stationed there, and became close with Jimbo in 1994 while working events alongside him and through mutual friends.
“We just kept running into each other everywhere,” Henni said. “We worked a lot of events together, and we did so well as a team. Then I moved to Miami for a job with the WOA, and then Jimbo decided to go to school. I decided to go with him.”
The two later married and now have two children, Annabella, 2, and Sebastian, 1. But whether there will be another Olympian hailing from Lake City is unclear.
“We don’t know if they’ll be interested in that sort of thing, so we’ll just wait and see,” said Henni who grew up in Bekescsaba, a small town near the Hungarian border with Romania. “We’re never going to
pressure them to do
anything they don’t want to. You have to want to do something 100 percent to do it at that level.
“We want them to do whatever makes them happy, just like we did.”
 |
||
| Fellows wins rain-soaked Nationwide race |
