EUGENE, Ore. — After failing to clear a height of 6-6 3/4 on her third try in the women’s high jump final, Vashti Cunningham waved to the crowd here at Hayward Field and hugged 32-year-old Chaunté Lowe, an athlete 14 years Cunningham’s senior and, with a trip to Rio booked, a four-time Olympian.
The embrace came with a message: I’m proud of you, Lowe said.
“I think that she’s just a fighter,” Cunningham said of Lowe. “She has it in her and she’s always going to have it in her.”
America’s outdoor and indoor recordholder in the high jump met the country’s future in the event, an 18-year-old Nevadan with the bloodlines — her father, Randall Cunningham, spent 17 seasons in the NFL including the Vikings — and sampling of professional success to herself be a likely Olympic fixture for years to come.
On Sunday, experience trumped potential.
“I just wanted to do like an Olympic prelim, just to see what if felt like,” Lowe said. “It felt so easy. I kind of expected it, but it felt easy. So I think that I’ll be ready in seven weeks.”
Yet while Lowe won — eventually clearing a 2016 world-best 6-7 to cap an extremely impressive run through the final — so did Cunningham, who will join Lowe and Inika McPherson in representing the USA in the discipline at the Rio Games.
“I think we may be able to see a sweep on the podium (in Rio),” Lowe said.
It’s an achievement made remarkable for her youth: Cunningham is the youngest U.S. track and field athlete to reach the Olympics since 1980.
“I’m very appreciative, just to be able to go to the Olympics this year,” Cunningham said. “So I’m more thankful than disappointed. It was a relief to qualify and just know that I was top three. At the same time, I still wanted to win. I always want to win.”
The trip to Rio caps a remarkable opening act in her budding professional career, which began on March 21, one day after Cunningham took the gold medal in the high jump at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Portland.
Yet losing has its benefits — particularly when it comes with the silver lining of nonetheless punching her ticket on the U.S. team for Summer Games.
Cunningham began to tire near the end of the second day of competition, noting how her “legs lost some juice” as the event reached heights above the Olympic standard. Her father, who doubles as her coach, noticed the same; he “wants to ratchet it up” in training, Cunningham said.
“I’ll just keep working until Rio so that doesn’t happen,” she said.
And there is added motivation to be found in a rare loss, particularly to a jumper who has stood as America’s greatest star in the event for more than a decade. It’s a flip of the script: Lowe had been propelled to maintain her fitness and conditioning due to Cunningham’s rise, and now the experienced Olympian passes along the favor to her young teammate.
“It does give me motivation,” Cunningham said, “because she tells me, ‘I’ve worked so hard this season because of you.’ So now I need to do the same because of her.”
