Isles sets sights on an Olympic double
RUGBY’S fastest man, Carlin Isles, remains on track to realise another dream this summer at the Tokyo Olympics as he targets gold with Mike Friday’s USA Sevens before taking on the fastest in the world in the 100m.
Isles, 31, fulfilled one dream by competing in Sevens at the Rio Olympics in 2016. Now he is hoping to fulfil his original ambition of making it to the Olympics as a sprinter as well.
Isles, a track star in high school and college before discovering rugby on YouTube, is hungry for Sevens gold after the USA’s group exit in Rio – and is also targeting the blue ribband event.
“It is still my dream,” says Isles, who has a 100m PB of 10.13s. “My pure speed is good and my tapin is good. It is well within the picture for me to make the Sevens squad and the track team for Tokyo. I get a lot of runing doing what I do with rugby, so the 100m still remains in the picture.
“I am dealing with some stupid calf injury at the moment which makes me scared about falling behind but my coach is in my ear to keep going and I have a lot of training under my belt.”
Isles was due on the track on April 6 but he’s pushed that back to a meeting later in the month.
“I have to get a qualifying time to get the ‘A’ standard to get to the trial, the meets will help me reach that standard and get me really sharp.
“Last summer I ran twice and clocked 10.3s and 10.2s. I was happy with those times because I hadn’t run at a meet in four years. That time as an opener was good because you tend to get faster and faster. I left a lot on the table.”
The Tokyo schedule is tight but not impossible for Isles with the Sevens ending on July 28 and the 100m preliminaries starting on July 31.
Isles had been aiming for the 2012 Olympics as a sprinter until the internet changed his life and he became enamoured by rugby’s ‘beauty’ watching YouTube.
He had $500 to his name and spent almost half of that on petrol for the 14hour drive from his Texas training camp to Aspen, Colorado to learn the ropes of rugby.
Three months after Usain Bolt ran 9.63s to claim gold at London 2012, Isles’ first foray into rugby came at the Gold Coast Sevens. He was introduced to the crowd as “the 23year-old whose PB of 10.13 would have seen him qualify for the semi-finals in London this summer”.
By the day’s end Isles had exploded into the conciousness and scored a try against a New Zealand.
“That try was really the moment when I thought ‘OK, this is made for me’. I had no idea what it was going to be like for me when I first got on to play them.
“From that moment I knew I had it. That was part of acknowledging that all the sacrifices I had made in my life had been worth it. The dream and vision that I had had come true.
“A lot of people find it hard to make their dream come true, but I had a picture I wanted to paint and I was able to do that.”
Isles’ early childhood in Ohio was a stark contrast to now.
Homeless and dependent on shelter, he and his twin sister were taken away from their mother by police and placed in Child Protection Services.
They moved from one foster home to the next and Isles says he has seen everything he didn’t want to be by the time he was adopted age seven. His salvation was the ‘gift’ he possessed of flat-out, effortless speed.
“Life in Ohio instilled a lot of values in me. A lot of hardships as well, but I conquered them and got better. It made me strong, a warrior, who I am today and I am grateful to be an Ohioan. The things that I endured during my childhood made me realise what I didn’t want to be. It was a vision for me.”
■ Subscribe to Red Bull’s Beyond the Ordinary Podcast, Season 1.