Tokyo (AFP) – A joke made at Cordell Tinch’s expense by his stepfather sparked the American into returning to the track and could climax with him deposing three-time 110 metres hurdles world champion Grant Holloway in Tokyo. Tinch, 25, has certainly not followed the usual path to becoming a top class athlete in taking time out from the sport in 2019 to sell mobile phones and work in paper factories amongst other odd jobs. He has progressed from the 2023 world 110m hurdles semi-finals to be world leader in the event this year and joint fourth fastest of all-time, having clocked 12.87sec in Shanghai.
Tinch says the sequence of events that has led to him lining up for the heats on Monday was initiated on a day of lazing around watching track and field on television with his stepfather Tyler, who he refers to as ‘dad’. “I think it was the 2020 NCAA Outdoor Championships,” Tinch told reporters on the eve of the World Athletics Championships. “I saw them running, I don’t know what they ran, but whatever time they ran then, my dad and I were sitting in the living room, as we usually do talking about sports, and he jokingly said, ‘You know, I just don’t think you got it no more.’ I was like, ‘Who are you talking to? What do you mean?’ And so we went to the track.”
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Tinch, who turned his back on American Football despite having a place at college, bashfully admitted track had been so far from his mind he took time to find his running equipment. “It took me 30 minutes to find my spikes. I had nothing to do with track at the time,” he said. “The only athletic things I did was I would go to our YMCA and play basketball once a week. So for me to go do that then, we had the thought of I want to go back and run, but in reality, I didn’t want to go back to school.”
It was not just his father who helped in his return to the track but also his mother Elizabeth Simmons, who urged him to give it another go and he said he owed her a huge debt. Despite this support, Tinch still had his doubts; his times reflected his rustiness, until the day he stepped onto the track for a meet. “When the gun went off, that’s when I knew I’m back where I’m supposed to be,” he said. “Once we turned that page, everything just kind of fell into place.”
Tinch, though, does not regret “that whole journey of working odd jobs, working with my family,” insisting that, if anything, without the break he would probably not be sitting in Tokyo. “I think I needed all of that in order to have the mentality that I do now of knowing where I was and knowing where I want to be,” he said. “So going home and working in paper factories and cell phone stores and moving companies, it was all fun.”
Behind the fun, Tinch continued, there was also a deeper sense that he was on a voyage of self-discovery. “I think that finding myself was the biggest part of all of that just because, at the time, I don’t think I was a very happy person,” he said. “I was going through a whole bunch of things. A lot of people around me were like, ‘You shouldn’t be working here. You’re supposed to be doing this. You’re supposed to be doing that.’ It’s really hard to believe what other people are saying when you don’t believe it yourself. So to be able to come back to the sport and kind of see how much I’ve missed it and find that happiness again was really, really big for me.”
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