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DeDee Nathan, 1997.

Photo by Nick Judy.

IU Archives P0021549.

DeDee Nathan

2000

Serving a Mission Beyond Sports

SHE SHARES A BIRTHPLACE WITH CARL LEWIS, GREATEST MALE ATHLETE OF the twentieth century. She shares an event with Jackie Joyner-Kersee, greatest female athlete of the twentieth century.

Yet DeDee Nathan’s life has largely been an unshared experience. She lived alone. She trained alone. She competed alone. Success and failure were hers alone.

“I’m an island,” she once said.

Except, she said, when she opened herself up to the Lord. Nathan became a Christian when she was twenty-one.

“You know, it has shaped my life, as it should,” she said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I wouldn’t take anything for my journey now.”

Nathan’s journey is unique in Indiana sports history. She has been a state champion, Big Ten champion, national champion, and world champion; she has been on a state championship team and coached a state championship team. She made it to her only Olympic Games at age thirty-two, but she came ever so close to being a four-time Olympian. Doing so would have tied her with JJK. She came within twenty-four points of beating JJK at the 1998 Goodwill Games.

With three women in the heptathlon going to the Olympics, Nathan finished fourth at the US trials in 1992 and 1996, and fifth in 2004. She won the 2000 trials and finished ninth at Sydney in what was an uncharacteristic performance. Afterward, she said, “I was out there long jumping, and God said, ‘You are already a champion. You’ve accomplished your goal.’ You do so much and you get to the pinnacle, what else is there to do? Yeah, you can win, but at the same time I could have missed this whole thing. . . . So this is really a blessing, it really is.”

Family heartache preceded Nathan’s Olympic blessing.

Her mother, Beverly, was eighteen when she gave birth to LaShundra Denise on April 20, 1968, in Birmingham, Alabama, also the birthplace of Lewis. Beverly’s sister began calling her niece DeDee, and the name stuck.

Beverly left Nathan’s father, moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1970, and married a police officer. The daughter never saw her father again until she was twenty-one.

He was in and out of prison, Nathan said.

Beverly and Robert Nathan had a son, Keith. DeDee took her stepfather’s name. The couple divorced while DeDee was in high school. She said her stepfather was overbearing and that his relationship with her mother was volatile. Theirs was not spiritual home.

However, Nathan and her half-brother were picked up by a Baptist church bus for Sunday services. Beverly said her daughter was strong-willed and energetic. DeDee liked to run and climb trees and fences.

“Everything had to be DeDee’s way,” the mother said. “I’d tell her life doesn’t work that way. You have to bend down sometimes.”

For years, Nathan, five foot eleven and 170 pounds, was judged as an athlete of talent but had no discipline. She has stated her progression was gradual because she stayed clean and did not use performance-enhancing drugs, as she claimed other heptathletes did.

As a high school freshman for Fort Wayne South Side, she ran on a 4×400-meter relay team that won a 1983 state title in 3:48.18, a record that stood for twenty-eight years. She won five state titles in the 100- and 300-meter hurdles.

At Indiana University, she was a six-time Big Ten champion in four different events: indoor 55-meter hurdles, pentathlon, long jump, and 400-meter hurdles.

As a junior in 1989, she was fourth in the long jump and sixth in the 400 hurdles at the NCAA Championships. She culminated her college career in 1990 by finishing second in the NCAA heptathlon with a school record of 5,855 points. That started a fifteen-year streak of ranking in the top ten in the United States in the hep.

Nathan was gold medalist at what proved to be a contentious Pan American Games at Havana in 1991. There were charges of Cuban corruption. Nathan said distances in the heptathlon were consistently shortened for the Americans, but she won nevertheless with 5,778 points. She affirmed she was a contender to make the Olympic team a year later.

In the Olympic Trials at New Orleans, Nathan was in the top three until the closing 800 meters. She finished thirty-eight points behind Kym Carter (6,200–6,162) for the final spot on the team going to Barcelona. She returned to the Pan Am Games in 1995, at Mar del Plata, Argentina, and won a bronze medal before finishing eighth at the World Championships in Rome.

She conceded she was angry sometimes because she had so little financial support. She worked twenty hours a week in an Indianapolis loan office. Eventually, she lived rent-free in a Bloomington apartment and collected financial support, including proceeds from her high school’s ten-year reunion.

“I feel like I owe a lot of people who invested a lot of time and energy in me to see it through,” she said then.

In the 1996 Olympic Trials at Atlanta, Nathan was first through two events (13.10 in the 100-meter hurdles and 6 feet in the high jump) and sixty-nine points behind JJK after day one. A poor javelin distance cost her in the next-to-last event—a throw ruled a foul would have meant 100 more points—and she again fell from third to fourth in the closing 800. Sharon Hanson edged Nathan, 6,352–6,327.

Nathan’s score would have placed seventh and made her top American at the Atlanta Olympics. The thirty-four-year-old JJK dropped out, and perhaps should have dropped out before the Olympics, allowing Nathan on the team. Nathan said it was her own “epic fail,” that she was in the best shape of her life and had no excuses.

“Nobody really knows this because I never talk about it. But it all had to do with spirituality and being obedient to God,” she said. “Every single time that I failed— and I failed big, and I always failed big because I succeeded big—it was a spiritual thing. God just had to get me in a certain spot. He let me know in ‘96 when I didn’t make that team, He let me know, ‘If you’re not going to be obedient and do what I want you to do, I will never let you go to the Olympics. You don’t go.’ And that’s the only thing I hadn’t done yet.”

In 1999, Nathan had her best year. At thirty, she became a world champion, winning the pentathlon in the World Indoor Championships at Maebashi, Japan. She set an American record of 4,753 points, smashing Carter’s record of 4,632 from 1995.Through 2019, Nathan’s record had been raised only fifty-two points.

Nathan said she came in expecting to win, did so emphatically, and earned $50,000 in prize money. World record holder Irina Belova of Russia won the silver medal with 4,691 points. Nathan was first in the 60-meter hurdles (8.26), high jump (6–1¼) and shot put (49–6½), third in the long jump (20–5¾) and second in the 800 meters (2:18.98), setting indoor personal bests in all five events.

Less than three months later, she won the heptathlon at Götzis, Austria, with 6,577 points, a career best and the world’s highest score in twenty-one months. It was a total that would have earned a bronze medal at the 1999 World Championships in Seville, Spain, but she inexplicably failed to clear a bar in the high jump at the nationals and did not qualify. It was reminiscent of the pole vault failure that kept Dan O’Brien out of the 1992 Olympic decathlon.

Finally and inevitably, in 2000, Nathan achieved her long-sought goal of making it to an Olympics. In the Olympic Trials at Sacramento, California, she won—by four points, 6,343–6,339, over Sheila Burrell—despite winning just two of seven events and turning in no personal bests. Nathan said it was as if God decided it was her time.

“I’m a lot older, a lot wiser, a lot stronger, mentally and physically,” she said. “I’m glad He had me stick it out these last four years.”

In Sydney, Nathan and decathlon bronze medalist Chris Huffins rented a house at a three-week cost of $15,000, sharing lodging with Nathan’s pastor and his wife, plus family and friends. Even in a stadium with 104,228 in attendance, she could see her pastor and hear the voice of her brother.

If only she could have felt her legs and body. A slow 100-meter hurdles time of 13.74 put her sixteenth after one event, and her medal chances were effectively over. She blamed anti-inflammatory medication she took to treat sore Achilles tendons.

“I just numbed my nervous system,” she said. “I got out with everybody; I just didn’t move.”

She finished ninth with 6,150 points, far off the bronze-winning score of 6,527. Gold medalist Denise Lewis of Great Britain scored 6,584, or just seven points more than Nathan had at Götzis in 1999. Nathan, standing next to Lewis, was the first to congratulate her when standings were announced.

It was the lowest-scoring heptathlon since the inaugural one at Los Angeles in 1984, when the top heptathletes were absent because of the Soviet-led boycott. Nathan was the top non-European finisher.

“Two days and eleven hours each day, we have nothing. There’s nothing in the tank,” Nathan said. “Our bodies are a mess. We’re a mess. We’re sore. We’re just so fatigued, it’s not even funny. When your body gives out on you, then your mind and heart kick in.”

Nathan had begun the year in a quest to make it to the Winter Olympics, training with bobsledders in Park City, Utah. She had the requisite size, strength, and speed, and initial results were astounding. Her push times were coming within fifteen hundredths of a second of those by the men.

She teamed with driver Bonny Warner and finished second in the national championships behind Jill Bakken, who went on to win a gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Nathan said the sensation of sledding was like that of riding a roller coaster with eyes closed.

“I never would have thought in a billion years about bobsled,” she said.

She did not pursue bobsled because she was not done with track and field, although it must have seemed like she was still on a roller coaster. She won her second national heptathlon title in 2001 despite arriving in Eugene, Oregon, at 4:30 a.m. on the day she was to open competition. Her flight was delayed in Denver by a hailstorm. After five hours of sleep, she competed in borrowed clothes, her college running shoes, and spikes a half inch too small. She nonetheless scored 6,174 points. At the World Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, she was seventh.

She tried once more to make it to an Olympics, and she said it was her “farewell to the sport.” She was fifth in the 2004 trials at Sacramento. Coincidentally, she was again third heading into the 800 and scored 6,020 points, her best since 2001. She was 106 points behind third place.

“I’m an Olympian because I gutted my way through that,” Nathan said. “It wasn’t because I was the most talented. I lost all the time. I gutted my way to the Olympics. Period.”

She became an educator in Indianapolis, first taking a position at Warren Central High School and later becoming an assistant principal at Pike High School. At Pike, she coached teams to girls’ state titles in 2012 and 2015 and runner-up finishes in 2014 and 2016. She became the first woman in Indiana to both compete for and coach a state championship team.

Nathan left coaching after 2017, staying until Lynna Irby left Pike. When Irby was a freshman, Nathan said it was her job to put the sprinter in position to make history, and the teenager did so. Irby achieved the unprecedented feat of becoming a four-time Indiana champion in the 100, 200, and 400 meters (2014–17).

Nathan might have achieved more in her own track and field career but expressed no disappointment. Her legacy is secure. She attributed temporary setbacks to stubbornness in wrestling with God.

“Finally pulled it all together in 1999 and 2000. Now I see it for the way it was,” she said. “He was trying to save my life. It’s my story. It’s my testimony. And I’m saved by it.”