World record holder Ryan Crouser one of several Olympians to compete at the Podium this weekend

Ryan Crouser, of the United States, competes in qualifications for the men’s shot put at the 2020 Summer Olympics, on Aug. 3 in Tokyo. (David J. Phillip)
By John Blanchette For The Spokesman-Review

The world has seen what the pressure cooker of Olympic competition – with heavy doses of doping politics and social fission mixed in – can do to teenage skaters and pixie gymnasts.

Well, even sport’s mammoths feel the strain, too.

For Ryan Crouser, the weight of the 2020 Games in Tokyo wasn’t 500 pounds on a lifting rack or even the 16-pound shot he propelled to another gold medal.

It was hoping his phone didn’t buzz.

COVID-19 didn’t just postpone the Olympics for a year. It toyed with the athletes’ preparation hour by hour.

“Every morning over there, you’d wake up the first thing you’d do is take a COVID test,” said Crouser. “Then you went into no-news-is-good-news mode. As long as you didn’t get contacted, you were able to train that day. Every time your phone would ring or go off, you didn’t want to look at it.”

Because a positive sent you into quarantine, and then home without even a chance to compete. It happened to Crouser’s Olympic suitemate, pole vaulter Sam Kendricks, who won a bronze in 2016 – the threat of exposure then ratcheting up the stress that much more.

“It was way more difficult to handle than the competition itself,” he said.

That he handled it by sending all six of his throws in the finals out beyond the standing Olympic record was all the more remarkable.

And now the hike – three years in the making – to do it again begins.

The world record-holder in the shot put is one of the headliners entered in the USA Track and Field Indoor Championships at the Podium, Spokane’s new multipurpose facility. The Saturday-Sunday event, with berths to next month’s world indoor championships at stake, includes nearly 50 Olympians among the 300-plus competitors – none more decorated than the 29-year-old from suburban Portland.

Of course, it might be assumed he was ordained to it, being a scion of American throwing’s first family.

Uncles Dean and Brian were both NCAA champions at Oregon, their appetites primed by the shot put ring father Larry installed in the backyard. And before Ryan’s father, Mitch, was an Olympic team alternate in 1984, he rewrote the record book at the University of Idaho.

He would eventually reach 220 feet, 6 inches in the discus – still in the American top 25 nearly 40 years later.

Mitch Crouser had been a javelin specialist in high school before blowing out his elbow, and spent two years in junior college turning himself into a shot and discus man “starting with the first couple of meets when I was dead last,” he said.

He’s been Ryan’s coach since his son first picked up an implement – trying to find an inch here or there, yes, but mostly “trying to help him not make all the same stupid mistakes I did.”

Such as?

“That it’s always the harder you go, the better,” he said. “That you have to do as many hard throws as you can in practice, or lift as heavy as you can in the weight room. Less can be more.”

Some of that was driven home when COVID took its bite out of the 2020 season, forcing athletes to take a longer view. Already the globe’s best thrower off his Olympic gold in 2016 and a world championship in 2019, Crouser building a foundation that produced a world indoor record of 74-10 1-2 in the first month of 2022.

He took his lifetime best to 75-6 in May, and in June’s Olympic Trials he finally took down Randy Barnes’ outdoor world record after 31 years, blasting one out to 76-8 1-4. And in Tokyo, his series averaged a stunning 75-0 1-2, topped by his last-throw 76-5 1-4.

Need context for all those 75-footers?

“Go to the bowling alley and pick up a bowling ball, a 16-pound ball,” he once said, “and then go to the basketball court and stand on the free-throw line and turn around and make a three-quarter court shot with that bowling ball.”

His expectations, given the juncture of the season, are more modest this weekend, though he’d like to improve on his own meet record of 74-1 3-4.

And he’s always in search of his white whale – what he calls “the outlier throw” that puts his world record out of sight.

“But the farthest possible throws just kind of happen – it’s not something you can make happen,” Crouser insisted.

Never mind that what people see from Crouser in that cramped concrete ring is a 6-7, 315-pound giant producing torque and explosion that borders on the violent. He equates it to something more delicate than bowling, or even basketball.

“It’s like a golf swing,” he said. “You’ll have those days when you’re just hitting the ball super easy and it’s just flying. Then you’ll blast one out 300 yards and you can’t believe how easy it felt. So then you try to hit it hard and it goes 100 yards left. So in the shot, you aim for consistency, because that’s a reflection that you’re doing things right.”

And no one in the event has ever done them as right as Ryan Crouser.

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