There’s one hurdle after another
Fawn Dorr’s mistake will keep her out of the Pan Ams, but it won’t slow her down
On the track, Fawn Dorr is all about precision. She is meticulous with her race preparation: warm up, cool down, the training drills, all of it.
At the elite level, it is little things that separate the good from the great and the great from the spectacular. Dorr knows what she wants to be.
But doing paperwork on time appears not to be her strength and, because of that, all the hard work that made her the second-fastest 400-metre hurdler in Canada this year won’t be enough to get her to the Toronto Pan Am Games.
Dorr, according to Athletics Canada, didn’t fill out the online declaration form that is mandatory to be selected to the Pan Am team. So Sarah Wells, another hurdler who ran slower than Dorr — and crashed over the final hurdle in their head-tohead race a week ago — was named to the team along with Canada’s fastest 400-metre hurdler, Sage Watson.
This is just the latest setback for Dorr. And regardless of whether she decides to appeal being left off the team over paperwork, it’s not going to keep her down for long.
Dorr has taken plenty of knocks but has always bounced back to pursue her dream: to run one lap around the track of10 hurdles as fast as she can at the Olympics.
“I’m a hurdler,” she says, “overcoming obstacles is my job.”
No matter what’s going on around her or who else is nearby, Dorr always seems to stand out. Her platinum blond hair is sculpted into a work of art; she wears a fearsomelooking mask that mimics altitude training by restricting airflow; and with her opinions — on everything from guns to gay rights — Dorr makes sure she’s not just another athlete on the track.
She was sponsored by Brooks, but they didn’t renew her contract last year. It could have been her results or something she said on social media — she’s not really sure — but she thinks “becoming Canadian” was the real deal-breaker.
It was the search for government funding and athletic respect that drove her to trade in her father’s U.S. passport for her mother’s Canadian one.
In 2010, Dorr, was one of the world’s top 10 in the 400-metre hurdles. But she was the third American and because she was seven-100ths of a second off the Olympic A standard, she didn’t get funding from USA Track and Field. “That really upset me,” she says. For athletes, funding isn’t just a way to pay the bills; it’s validation that they are worth something as competitors, that their struggle to be the best has value and meaning. For many, that matters even more than the money.
“It wouldn’t take much,” she says. “A thousand a month would be great. I can live on that. I’m not asking to be a millionaire.”
So far, her gamble to race for Canada, where she spent summers at her parent’s hunting and fishing resort in northern Ontario, hasn’t paid off. She missed a place on the 2012 Olympic team by one spot, and Athletics Canada still hasn’t funded her.
Last fall, she lived cheaply with her sister in Buffalo and drove from there to Toronto to train with the Canadian sprinters. She borrowed her way to the winter training camps in St. Kitts. The team came home between camps to enjoy Christmas holidays with their families, but not Dorr.
“There’s no point in going home, I can’t train there,” she says. “I’ll have a real life after the dream is over.”
At one practice in Toronto, she is dressed head to toe in red. Even her training mask has a maple leaf on it. It’s as though she hopes to use the same willpower she exhibits on the track to force the Canadian system to fund her.
Most of the runners are still warming up or chatting while slowly taking off layers of clothing but she’s on the line, ready to go. She drove from Buffalo in sub-zero temperatures in a car with a broken window for this. Dorr doesn’t have health insurance on either side of the border so, really, a broken car window is the least of her concerns.
“She’s crazy but good,” coach Anthony McCleary says, as he watches her execute drills with precision, every time.
“My body doesn’t dictate what I do,” Dorr says. “I tell my body what to do. Every athlete has a choice. The weak athletes are the ones who listen to their body.”
Despite the struggles for funding and finding her place in Canada — as she says, “no one likes it when an athlete flips from country to country,” — Dorr doesn’t regret her decision to train with the Toronto-based team.
“Your teammates will pull you through on a bad day and boost your ego on a good day. That’s the perks of a group like this,” she says. “It supports the dream even if it isn’t paying the bills.”
Dorr used to tell herself that if she couldn’t make a living at track it would be time to move on. But, now, she finds she can’t do it.
“It’s not about love anymore,” she says. “I missed the last Olympics by one spot. How can I walk away from that?”
“I got one more shot,” she says of Rio in 2016 where she’d be 29 — that’s old in track years. “I can’t live with myself if I don’t try.”
So, she puts on the mask that makes it feel like she’s breathing through a straw, and hunts for those fractions of a second that have stood in her way.
“At the end of my season, and eventually my career, I have to live with what I’ve done,” she says. “It’s 16 years of my life. If I don’t give everything, then what was the point to any of it?”