Then there are the hundreds of young people among her 2,000-plus Facebook followers — many of them school girls from here in the Miami Valley and across the nation — who send regular messages to the Olympic silver medalist from Dayton.
“One young lady was from New Jersey, I think,” Fountain said.
“She wanted me to call her principal and help her change her track program at her school.”
Her biggest following may well be from Germany — where she regularly competes when touring Europe — but she’s popular back here, too.
She threw out the first pitch at the Dayton Dragons game earlier this month, a Kettering bank has featured her photo in an ad and, of course, there are those lovestruck guys — some a little creepy, some just heartfelt:
“One guy sent me a message saying, ‘You compete so hard out there. I need a woman like you. Where have you been all my life?’ ”
Such is life since the 28-year-old heptathlete won her Olympic medal exactly one year ago today — Aug. 16, 2008 — at the Beijing Games. It made her the only American woman other than Jackie Joyner-Kersee ever to win an Olympic heptathlon medal.
And to answer that one guy: Where Fountain is today — much to her dismay — is here in Dayton, rather than at the World Championships in Berlin.
The heptathlon competition is wrapping up there today and Fountain — rated No. 2 in the world — was figured to contend for the title, especially after the way she’d dominated the first five of the seven events at the U.S. Championships in Eugene, Ore., seven weeks ago.
Having the meet of her life, she appeared on track to reach 6,900 points, which would have put her behind only Swedish superstar Carolina Kluft for the best mark in the world in 13 years.
But then — thanks to one, violent snap of the neck — she found herself being carried out of the stadium on a stretcher. As she was put in the back of an ambulance — while Lynn Smith, her personal coach and Central State’s women’s coach jumped in the front — she started to panic:
“I’d lost the feeling in my upper body.”
Costly price to pay
The biggest surprise she had in Beijing was the flood of feelings that washed over her as she stood on the medal podium that night at the crowded, red-lit Bird’s Nest Stadium.
“I didn’t think I’d be so emotional, but at the biggest moment of my life I had come though,” she said. “And to see the flag raised and to hear the crowd and see my mom and sister in the front row and know we were all experiencing it together, it just overwhelmed me.”
Initially, Fountain won bronze, but then Ukrainian silver medalist Lyudmila Blonska tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltestosterone, was stripped of her hardware and literally thrown out of the Olympic Village.
It was Blonska’s second doping offense and she was given a lifetime ban. “You probably won’t ever see her again,” Fountain said. “She can’t compete, can’t coach, probably can’t even walk on her own streets anymore. That’s the price you pay.”
As she headed back to Dayton after the Games — to serve as grand marshal of Kettering’s Holiday at Home parade and then be honored at the Wilmington Pike Home Depot, where she’d worked in the garden department before Beijing — Fountain said she had her medal “zippered up in my pocket because somebody told me about an athlete who once lost their medal on the flight home.”
So as she sat in a Kettering cafe and talked last week, where was her medal now?
“I think it’s on my kitchen table,” she said. “I was in my friend’s wedding in New Jersey last week and brought it along because a lot of her little cousins wanted to see it.”
She started to smile: “It’s got a few nicks in it. When I went back to my hometown (Harrisburg, Pa.) some of the little kids at the school were pretty excited and they dropped it a few times.”
But while Walter Payton once got his Super Bowl ring pilfered at a school, she laughed and said she wasn’t too worried:
“I tell everybody ahead of time, ‘Don’t try leaving out that door with my medal. I will run you down and catch you.’ ”
A pain in the neck
She’d heard about the post-Olympic problems athletes face:
“They say the year after the Games is very hard on athletes because of all the stress from the Trials and then again at the Olympics.”
She figured she’d be fine, though, especially after winning again last fall in Talence, France, as she wrapped up her season with meets in Europe, Japan and China.
At the U.S. Championships in late June, she strained her neck during the high jump, the second event of the two-day competition.
“It happened when I was jumping 6-feet on my first attempt,” she said. “It was like whiplash. I threw my head back and looked to the side when I jumped and then when I landed I rolled and crunched it.
“They worked on it between events, but I finished the day pretty stiff. I shouldn’t have come back the next day, but I was on a roll. I was scoring big and I was like ‘it’s for the world championships.’ ”
The next day she landed her best long jump ever — 22 feet, 9¾ inches — but aggravated her neck again. This time her body started to go numb.
So with a big lead and just two events to go, she was forced to withdraw, costing her the U.S. crown and keeping her from qualifying for the world championships.
“As they were taking me away, all I wanted to do was get back on the track,” she said quietly. “I nearly worked myself up into an asthma attack.”
Treated for a strained neck, she missed some meets, but she’s back competing again. She leaves this week for Estonia, followed by some other European and Asian stops.
Like many athletes from the Beijing Games, she hasn’t found her Olympic accomplishments to be a springboard to financial opportunity in these tough economic times.
She’d like to do some modeling and thinks a reality show would be fun. “Something like The T.O. Show,” she said of Terrell Owens’ offering on VH1. “The one with athletes and supermodels and all. Now that’d be cool.”
And while she seems to have the portfolio for all that — looks, personality and big-time success — she’s finding her true calling as a role model to young people.
She has spoken at several schools around Dayton and is a huge hit back home in Pennsylvania.
“At my old middle school, the kids were all out front with posters to greet me when I drove up,” she said. “Inside they had my pictures everywhere on the walls and in the (trophy) cases.
“All the kids came to the auditorium and some of my old teachers who are retired now were there. They’re the people who helped me keep on the right track and it was emotional. I cried all day.
“They had a slide show of me set to music, students asked questions and then they read me their essays. One topic was ‘Why I want to be like Hyleas Fountain.’ The other was ‘Why I want to have lunch with Hyleas.’
“It was nice. There were some real creative ones.
Then she smiled because, of course, none of the lunch bunch quite topped the guy back here.
No one offered to buy her an ice cream cone — “not one, but like 12.”
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