“I did a clinic out at the track where the Americans practice and there were over 100 kids, at least half of them girls, all around 12 or 13,” said the three-time Olympian and bronze medal winner from Meadowdale High School who now is an assistant track coach for the U.S. women competing at the 2012 Olympic Games.
For the British children it was a chance to meet an Olympic medal winner and some of the kids made the most of the opportunity.
“One of the girls, she was a sixth grader, said she really wanted to come to America,” Tonja said. “I told her, ‘Well, a great way to do that is stay focused in your academics and maybe you can come to college on an academic scholarship. Or maybe an athletic scholarship. You never know. There are lots of opportunities these days.”
And that brought about that full circle memory.
When she was 12, Tonja met Olympic great Wilma Rudolph at a kids’ track meet in Indianapolis.
But the difference for her was that back in the early 1980s there weren’t that many iconic women athletes to look up to for a little girl.
“Even after that, I never really thought about the Olympics as a possibility until 1988,” Tonja said. “Oh, I’d heard of Edwin Moses — he was from our town — but it wasn’t a reality for me until Lavonna Martin made the ’88 team.
“She was from Dayton, too, and she was someone I knew. I had grown up in her dad’s program. The Northwest Track Club is the only club I ran for from the time I was eight until I went to college. Lefty Martin was my coach and I used to go over to their house.
“And when Lavonna made it to Seoul, it was like, ‘OK, the Olympics are real now. It’d be really cool to be a part of it.’”
Girls today have so many more opportunities, she said:
“Because of the impact of Title IX, girls in America have more sports to compete in in college and they are seeing more women as coaches and role models. There are just so many more examples of how you can achieve. These days it’s just so much more common to see a woman go out and win a gold medal.”
Although other countries don’t have a legal mandate like the one that began to open the playing fields in the U.S. for girls and women 40 years ago, some nations are doing what they can to keep up with their American counterparts.
Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and the new Dream Team aside, these Olympics are the Women’s Games.
For the first time in history the U.S. sent more women athletes than men to the Olympics. And the women — including Middletown’s Kayla Harrison in judo — have won twice as many gold medals in London as have the men.
With Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei all sending women to London to compete for them first time ever, each of the 204 nations at these Games has women Olympians. And with the debut of women’s boxing, every Olympic sport now has women competing in it
So Tonja’s advice to that young girl was sound. The same work-hard mantra paid off for her and made her one of the most glorious and long-lasting athletic careers that any woman from the Miami Valley has ever had.
Start on the track
It was during the morning announcements in school that Tonja said she first heard about a track program open to girls. She was in the second grade and that night she pleaded with her single-parent mom to sign her up.
Although it was a financial challenge for Georgianna Buford — she was raising six kids on her own — she scraped up enough money to get Tonja and her sister Tamika into the Northwest Track Club.
Georgianna wanted better for her kids than she had had for herself. Until she was eight she was raised in the Shawen Acres orphanage. She was abused as a child and at 16 — already with a baby of her own — she finally quit school.
Some years later she said her ex-husband told her she’d “end up on the street with all those kids.”
And the odds got tougher when her daughter Crystal was stricken with muscular dystrophy as a young teen and ended up in a wheelchair within 18 months.
But Georgianna refused to wilt and her kids inherited that backbone. The family shopped for clothes at thrift stores and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.
And through it all, Georgianna will proudly tell you, she never once went on public assistance. She worked a multitude of jobs, everything from food service at nursing homes to prison guard at Lebanon Correctional Institution.
The kids worked, too. Before school, Tonja would deliver the newspaper door to door.
And as Tonja began to excel in track, her bond with Crystal deepened.
“Crystal’s just 11 months older than I am,” Tonja once told me. “That could have been me. (MD is genetic) So now every race I run, every day I train, I do it with my sister in mind.”
In turn, Crystal, who became her sister’s biggest fan, said “ Tonja’s got the legs for both of us now.”
And Tonja made the most of them. At Meadowdale, she won the state 100 meter hurdles title three years in a row and took the 300 meter hurdles crown, as well, as a senior.
As a sprinter, hurdler and relay member at Illinois, she won 25 Big Ten titles — more than any other athlete, male or female, in the conference. Four times she was the Big Ten Athlete of the Year and in 1992 she won the NCAA 400 meter hurdles title.
She was a wide-eyed kid when — as the second youngest member on the team — she competed in the 400 meter hurdles at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Her story won the hearts of Dayton folks back then and some pooled their money to send her mom to the Games.
Tonja made it to the semifinals at those Games and soon after her career began to take off internationally. At the 1995 World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, she and teammate Kim Batten both shattered the world record. Batten edged her by an eyelash for gold — clocking a 52.61 seconds to her 52.62 — and their times remain the fourth and fifth fastest in history for women.
Considered a favorite to win in Atlanta in 1996, she was hampered by an Achilles injury and took a bronze medal behind Deon Hemmings, the Jamaican gold medalist who had run at Central State, and Batten.
Married by then to Victor Bailey, then a receiver for the Kansas City Chiefs, Tonja took two years off and had their son V.J. In early 1999 she returned to the sport and struggled mightily.
She contemplated quitting, but her mom gave her a pep talk, reminding her that none of them had quit on anything. All of the kids — and Georgianna, too — had gone on to get college degrees.
After that, Tonja stunned everyone and qualified to run the 400 hurdles at the 2000 Games in Sydney.
She admits she ran out of time to get in top shape and didn’t make the final, but a year later she was back at the top of the hurdling world and won the prestigious IAAF Grand Prix Final in Melbourne, Australia.
“That race was on Sept. 9, 2001 and it took me 17 hours to fly back to the States,” she said quietly. “I got home at night on the 10th and when I finally woke up the next morning — that was September 11th — the whole world had changed.
“ I had just flown 17 hours in one of those metal tubes and then comes 9/11 and it just blew my mind. I was running as fast as everybody again, but I wasn’t getting the kind of contracts I wanted, I had a family and now there was this new horror. That was it. I stopped right there. I don’t think I got into a plane again for a whole year.”
‘Always wanted to be a teacher’
“Ever since I was in high school I wanted to be a teacher,” Tonja said.” I used to be in this program where I went to Meadowdale Elementary and helped kids with reading. And from then on I knew I wanted to teach.”
At Illinois she got a degree in elementary education and following her running days, she taught fourth grade in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In 2004, her former coach at Illinois, Gary Winckler, brought her back as his assistant and four years later she replaced him as the Illini’s head women’s coach. A year after that, new men’s coach, Mike Turk, had her begin coaching his male sprinters and hurdlers, too.
Five years ago she coached the American team at the Pan American Juniors in Brazil and in 2009 she was one of the U.S. coaches at the World Championships in Berlin.
“I love coaching, but I also don’t like being away from my family,” she said. “Right now I haven’t seen my babies or my husband in a few weeks.”
Her two children — V.J. is now 13 and daughter Victoria is 9 — are staying with her mom in Huber Heights during the Olympics.
Meanwhile, in London, Tonja is in charge of some of the biggest names on the American team: sprinters Allyson Felix, Carmelita Jeter and Sanya Richards-Ross and hurdlers Lashinda Davis, Dawn Harper, Kellie Wells and Lolo Jones.
In the five sprints and hurdles races, U.S. women have won seven medals including two golds — Felix in the 200 meters and Richards-Ross at 400 meters.
While each of the athletes has a personal coach, as well, she handles several behind-the-scenes jobs and said she’s also a sounding board for some athletes:
“Some who don’t run what they think they should have are disappointed and I’m like, ‘You know what? At my first Olympics I wasn’t a finalist either, but at the next Olympics I was a medalist.’
“And then there are the people who wanted gold and instead get silver or bronze. That was the case with Carmelita and I told her, ‘I remember when I got my bronze medal. At first I was disappointed. But after that, when people realize you went to the Olympics, the first thing they ask is if you got a medal. They don’t ask what color it is.
“I just try to let people understand that there is a bigger picture. Everybody who runs track wants to be an Olympian. I don’t know about other sports, but in track you can go to world championships and get medals, but if you never make an Olympic team, I’m almost certain that athlete feels like there’s something missing.
“Once you’re an Olympian, you are that always and forever.”
It’s a badge Tonja wears proudly. Although her medal is kept in a lock box, she has the three Olympic uniforms she ran in – at Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney – all individually framed and hanging on the wall of her office at Illinois.
“I was proud to wear them and represent my country,” she said. “And they help remind me just how special track has been in my life. It got me a college education. It’s taken me to so many different countries and enabled me to do so many things and meet so many people. And now it allows me to teach young athletes.
“That’s why I love the sport so much. It took a little girl from Dayton and opened up the whole world to her.”
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