Ryan ChartrandFor many, life after Cal Poly is work, work, take a break and work some more. For former Cal Poly high jumper Sharon Day, the surreal life that came a few months after graduating from Cal Poly reflected the opening ceremony to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Both were full of surprises.
Today, Day is coming out of a month-long break, and her coach, Jack Hoyt, says he is getting her ready to qualify for her next major competition at the 2009 IAAF World Championships in Berlin.
“She took a good month off,” he says. “We’re working on her conditioning now, but she’ll be training hard again soon.”
Day met the qualifying standard for Beijing by clearing a personal-best 6 feet, 4 _ inches May 17. About three weeks after graduating from Cal Poly with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and signing a professional contract with ASICS, she finished third in the women’s high jump finals at the U.S. Olympic Trials at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore. on July 4. It earned her a trip to Beijing, where she jumped Aug. 21.
The pressure of competing, she says, was greater because it was the Olympics, but she’d already competed against most of the other jumpers there.
“The whole time I was, ‘Come on, come on, I’m ready to go,’ ” Day remembers of having to wait nearly two weeks in China before the qualifying round. “I was anxious.”
She finished 23rd overall with a mark of 6-_.
“It was a lot of fun,” says Day, a seven-time All-American while at Cal Poly. “I wish I did better, but I wasn’t ready for the rain.”
When it was time to say good-bye to the games, the smog (which Day says was not as bad as she had anticipated) and the “super-nice” people, Day says, she was ready to simply focus on her next challenge.
She got a taste of Olympic fame instead. On Sept. 12, Day made an appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” to demonstrate her high-jumping technique.
“It was so much fun, and it was so last-minute,” Day says. “One of the other jumpers canceled last-minute so they called me.”
On the show, she cleared 5-10, getting Letterman to exclaim, “Wasn’t that absolutely beautiful?” and “It’s poetry in motion.”
The two-time Cal Poly Athlete of the Year has already experienced her share of perks stemming from the Olympics; earlier this month she visited the White House and met the president as part of the U.S. Olympic team.
Now, the 23-year-old Costa Mesa native is living in San Luis Obispo, where many of her former classmates wished they would never leave, and says she plans to high jump as long as her body permits.
“Making the Olympic team, you have so many opportunities, so many doors open, and the perks are there,” she says. “All my hard work has paid off.”