One of Us highlights celebrities, entertainers, and public figures who once competed in track & field. Before the spotlight, they were lining up in the same lanes, jumping in the same pits, and running the same races as athletes across the country.
Ours is truly a year round sport. Cross Country. Indoor track. Outdoor track. Championship season. Off-season. And then of course there's the annual viral news cycle about a celebrity that was allegedly a great high school track and field athlete.
It's the sort of information that's dropped in a sparsely read interview given to a Scandinavian alt-weekly or offhandedly mentioned on a comedian's podcast. "I was actually a high school track star." No follow-up questions are asked, the quote is aggregated by track and field media outlets, then it's served up as chum for the comments section.
In terms of low-stakes mythmaking, it works, because the celebrity in question's success in the sport is usually plausible, with some… notable exceptions. And historically, far-fetched-sounding claims about track exploits have been difficult to truly disprove.
Take last year's Celebrity Who Ran Track hysteria, for instance, which kicked into gear when Jennifer Lopez claimed to have once clocked a 4:49 mile. There are old scanned stories attesting to somebody named Jennifer Lopez being a good age distance runner for an AAU team that makes sense geographically and fits the timeline. It's entirely possible it was J.Lo, if we give her a pass and say she meant to say "1500m," not "mile." But even then, the trail runs cold. We will likely never know with 100% certainty what Jennifer Lopez's true lifetime mile/1500m PB is. Alas!
But for celebrities who more recently entered the public consciousness--like, say, Chappel Roan, birth name: Kayleigh Amstutz--there is digitized, indisputable evidence about their participation in the sport. If you're famous, a generation or two younger than J.Lo, and raced for your high school, your achievements are housed within Milesplit's vast archive of results.
So with apologies to the online sleuths who obsess over verifying celebrity claims to track stardom, you're part of a dying industry. Fact-checking that sort of thing is now as simple as typing a name into MileSplit's search bar. Your uncle's dusty binder full of yellowed newspaper clippings (labeled "TRACK THEORIES") can be safely returned to the attic.
In the spirit of celebrating the wild amount of data we are rolling in, we're going to state a track fact, not weigh in on a track rumor: Bianca Belair, WWE superstar, was a Tennessee high school state champion hurdler and accomplished collegiate athlete.
(Photo: Saul Young / News Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK)
Wrestling fans today know Belair as the "EST of WWE" (think: fastEST, the strongEST, the quickEST, the roughESET, and the toughEST), a supremely athletic wrestler with flair for days and a long braided ponytail with which she routinely flogs opponents. She won the 2021 Royal Rumble, has claimed three WWE Women's World Championships, and headlined and won the main event of WrestleMania 37. (And strengthening her track and field and WWE bonafides, she's married to fellow pro wrestler and high school track standout Montez Ford--real name: Kenneth Crawford.)
But before all that, Belair was a legitimate track star at Austin East High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, from 2003 to 2007.
Only back then, she was known as Bianca Blair, four-time Tennessee state champion across the 100m and 300m hurdles. During her senior year, she even placed third in the 100m hurdles and sixth in the 400m hurdles at Nike Outdoor Nationals. Her prep PRs (13.57 for the 100m hurdles and 41.97 for the 300m hurdles) rank her second all-time in both regularly contested hurdle events in Tennessee high school history.
After wrapping up her illustrious career at Austin East, Belair enrolled at and continued to compete for the University of South Carolina. She then transferred to Texas A&M. At both stops, she struggled to match the caliber of her high school performances, and has been open about struggling with disordered eating and her mental health throughout her collegiate career.
After her year at A&M, she transferred again, this time back to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee. Belair didn't intend to compete as a Lady Vol, but eventually made the decision to walk onto the squad. During her time at UT, she chipped away at old lifetime PBs and qualified for the NCAA East Regional meet in 2013. She graduated as a two-time member of the SEC academic honor roll with a wind-legal lifetime 100m PB of 13.38 (she also ran 13.35 with a 2.5 m/s tailwind).
Once her track career ended, Belair turned to CrossFit to satisfy her love of fitness and competitive drive. Her early results on the CrossFit circuit were impressive: 310 lb back squat, 260 lb front squat, 200 lb power clean, 200 lb jerk, 135 lb snatch. But her CrossFit career was short-lived, thanks to a medical condition informally yet gruesomely called "slipping rib syndrome."
She was working a sales job, figuring that was the end of her athletic career, when WWE hall-of-famer Mark Henry found footage of her competing in CrossFit, and encouraged her to try out for the WWE. (Keeping things in the track and field cinematic universe, Henry himself was an accomplished shot and disc thrower at Silsbee High School in Hardin County, Texas, and was a part of the 1988 state 4A championship squad.)
She did so in 2016. It went well enough for her to sign on with WWE, and she made her television debut the following year as a performer with NXT, WWE's developmental brand. From there, the rest is history… or at least the kind of history worth chronicling here to ensure future wrestling and/or track fans recognize that this WWE legend is legitimately one of our own!
Ours is truly a year round sport. Cross Country. Indoor track. Outdoor track. Championship season. Off-season. And then of course there's the annual viral news cycle about a celebrity that was allegedly a great high school track and field athlete.
It's the sort of information that's dropped in a sparsely read interview given to a Scandinavian alt-weekly or offhandedly mentioned on a comedian's podcast. "I was actually a high school track star." No follow-up questions are asked, the quote is aggregated by track and field media outlets, then it's served up as chum for the comments section.
In terms of low-stakes mythmaking, it works, because the celebrity in question's success in the sport is usually plausible, with some… notable exceptions. And historically, far-fetched-sounding claims about track exploits have been difficult to truly disprove.
Take last year's Celebrity Who Ran Track hysteria, for instance, which kicked into gear when Jennifer Lopez claimed to have once clocked a 4:49 mile. There are old scanned stories attesting to somebody named Jennifer Lopez being a good age distance runner for an AAU team that makes sense geographically and fits the timeline. It's entirely possible it was J.Lo, if we give her a pass and say she meant to say "1500m," not "mile." But even then, the trail runs cold. We will likely never know with 100% certainty what Jennifer Lopez's true lifetime mile/1500m PB is. Alas!
But for celebrities who more recently entered the public consciousness--like, say, Chappel Roan, birth name: Kayleigh Amstutz--there is digitized, indisputable evidence about their participation in the sport. If you're famous, a generation or two younger than J.Lo, and raced for your high school, your achievements are housed within Milesplit's vast archive of results.
So with apologies to the online sleuths who obsess over verifying celebrity claims to track stardom, you're part of a dying industry. Fact-checking that sort of thing is now as simple as typing a name into MileSplit's search bar. Your uncle's dusty binder full of yellowed newspaper clippings (labeled "TRACK THEORIES") can be safely returned to the attic.
In the spirit of celebrating the wild amount of data we are rolling in, we're going to state a track fact, not weigh in on a track rumor: Bianca Belair, WWE superstar, was a Tennessee high school state champion hurdler and accomplished collegiate athlete.
Track & field has shaped countless athletes long before they became household names. One of Us looks back at the track & field careers of celebrities who once competed in the sport — proving that no matter where life takes them, they started as one of us.