Olympic heartbreak is all over the tube again, making best-of-seven despair and NFL overtime outrage look very small.

There’s only one thing that trumps it: Olympic Trials heartbreak and not even making it to that grand stage.

Donavan Brazier has run two laps of the track faster than any American in history, but on the day he had to summon his best last June, it wasn’t there to answer. And if it turned out he was trying to make the U.S. Olympic team on a broken leg, that wasn’t nearly as painful as not making it at all.

“I’ve lost hundreds of hours of sleep over that one race,” he admitted.

The tonic: another race, and more after that.

The next one brings Brazier – the No. 1-ranked 800-meter runner in the world for 89 weeks between 2019 and 2021 – to Spokane on Friday for the Lilac Grand Prix, a brisk program of professional track and a warm-up for the USATF national championships later in the month at the city’s new indoor venue, the Podium.

What’s Brazier trying to summon this time?

“He’s going to go after the world record for 600 meters,” said his coach, Pete Julian. “You might be seeing the first world record on the Podium track.”

In fact, Brazier already owns the record at the indoor-centric distance. The 24-year-old, who spent a year at Texas A&M before turning pro, clocked 1 minute, 13.77 seconds to win the USATF title in 2019 in Staten Island, New York, despite thinking that he might be “a little overweight and not quite in shape at the time.”

And this time?

Well, he launched his comeback from that Olympic Trials disappointment at the Millrose Games in New York by running the 400 meters in a 46.55 – a lifetime best indoors or out.

“But it’s still a question mark what kind of shape I’m in,” he said. “I ran a good 400 and I think everything’s coming together for a good 6, but you don’t know until you’re out there.”

That’s the voice of experience.

Brazier won the NCAA outdoor 800 in 2016 at A&M – besting Jim Ryun’s 50-year-old American junior record in the process – and the USATF outdoors in his first year as a pro. But there were hiccups, too – disqualified in the 2018 IAAF World Indoor heats and an Achilles injury that spring. Later in the year he connected with Julian and what was then known as the Nike Oregon Project and relocate to Portland.

The results were nothing short of sensational – that indoor 600 record, another national championship outdoors and ultimately the IAAF world title in 1:42.34, breaking Johnny Gray’s 34-year-old American record. All of it earned him the Jesse Owens Award as U.S. track’s athlete of the year.

Then came the pandemic and the Olympic postponement, and then that crushing day in Eugene last June, when he struggled in last in the 800 final.

Brazier had experienced pain in the heats and semis, but the medical consensus, Julian said, was that “we’ll tape it up and get through the final and he’ll be fine. But what he had was a bony growth that was starting to wedge into his tibia – it wound up breaking his tibia.”

But here’s the thing: Brazier wouldn’t allow himself to even betray a limp, or an excuse.

“I’m still going to feel like I’m the best 800-meter runner in the world when I go into meets,” he told reporters that day. “Today, I obviously wasn’t. There were seven guys in front of me that proved it.”

Time and the diagnosis and surgery haven’t changed his outlook.

“You have to give guys credit where it’s due – the guys who made the team,” he said. “I know what it’s like to win and I know what it’s like to lose and obviously winning feels a lot better. But I know after the world championships the first guy to congratulate me was Bryce (Hoppel), who was fourth that day and just missed a medal. When Bryce made the (Olympic) team, I wanted to be the first to congratulate him.”

Naturally, that didn’t make watching the Olympics any easier. So he didn’t much. He went back to his parents’ home in Michigan, hung out with old friends and tuned in a few of the women’s races – but that was all. By November, he was easing back into running with his Nike Union Athletics Track Club teammates.

“I’m right where I need to be,” Brazier said. “I’ve taken my blows and haven’t let them bring me down. I like to think I can come back from anything.”

The next step comes in Spokane.