Just keep running: Cordell Tinch, hurdles and the will to keep coming back

Cordell Tinch had a decision to make.

There, on the side of the track at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, in his mother’s arms. Dejected, heart still pounding from running the 110-meter hurdle finals in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials.

A year and a half ago, he was selling cell phones, having walked away from the track for a third time. Now, with the world’s biggest stage in sight, he’d cleared those 110 meters and 10 hurdles in 13.03 seconds. That time would have gotten him a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, but here in Eugene, in the fastest 110-meter hurdle race ever, it got him nothing. He finished in fourth place, seven-hundredths of a second away from being an Olympian.

He'd walked away three times already. Now he wondered, in that moment, why he was even running anymore.

His mother, Elizabeth, couldn’t hold back the tears as the crowd cheered Grant Holloway, Freddie Crittenden and Daniel Jones onto the Paris games. She cried because her son had just missed his dream by less than the blink of an eye. And she cried because now she knew he had to do what she’d done her whole life, get back up. Choose to keep going. 

Since having Cordell as a 15-year-old single mother, she’d been coaching him to overcome life’s challenges.

Don’t sit for too long, or you might never get back up, she’d tell him.

He’d taken that advice before. Each time he’d walked away from school and before, he found his way back.

When he was working a paper machine in a Georgia-Pacific factory, he was running races in his mind, counting the steps between hurdles. While donating plasma, he scrolled through his phone and found pictures of former teammates still grinding away on tracks across the country.

He never sat for too long.

But this moment was different. He’d spent the last year working like he’d never worked before. Flights, races on the other side of the world, a professional contract. And he was seven hundredths of a second too slow.

Cordell hugged his mom, glanced back and the track, where the three Olympic hurdlers talked to NBC. He shook his head. He’d already made his decision.

Cordell was in Coffeyville, Kansas when he decided to quit for track the third time. And this time it was probably for good, he thought. 

He’d already left two schools. First the University of Minnesota, where he burned out after a few weeks of trying to juggle Division I football and track at the same time. Then the University of Kansas, where he first got the track world’s attention, winning the 110 hurdles and Freshman of the Year honors at the Big 12 Championships before an eligibility issue kept him out of the NCAA Championships. 

He transferred again, this time a couple hours south to Coffeyville Community College, where he thought he’d pay some dues, stay in shape and find a way to get back to Division I.

But it never worked out. He struggled to find focus and motivation. Then the pandemic hit. He called his mother, Elizabeth Tinch.

“I’m coming home,” he told her. “I think I’m done with school.”

Elizabeth did what any mother would do; she welcomed him home. Let him lick his wounds, cooked him meals and heaped encouragement on him.

She knew he couldn’t stay down forever. He was too much like her.

Get Elizabeth talking about her son — like any proud mother, she’ll do so at length — and she’ll outwardly wonder where he gets it. Where does his tenacity come from? His perseverance? That bright, charming smile? All that damn energy?

But ask her a few more questions and she’ll admit it. It all comes from her. She’s overcome so much in her 39 years of life and Cordell saw it all. 

It’s why he’s always been able to get back up when he falls, when he trips on one of life’s hurdles. He’d always had the mental toughness to go with his natural athleticism — a combination that lends itself to the unusual demands of the hurdles.

The 110-meter hurdles is perhaps the most technical event in the precision-centric world of track and field, a combination of power and timing and rhythm that doesn’t exist elsewhere in sports.

Elite sprinters are born athletes. Their muscular development just isn’t the same as the rest of the population, even other world-class athletes. They have well-developed hip flexors, extensors and other proximal thigh muscles.

The average human, trotting across a grocery store parking lot to return their cart, carries about a 50-50 mix of slow twitch and fast twitch muscles. High-level athletes, especially sprinters, usually have around 70 percent fast twitch, allowing them to quickly accelerate over short distances.

They’re finely tuned, powerful engines that explode out of the blocks. But then it gets complicated. If one step is too long, if one step is too short, the athlete’s rhythm is thrown off, which means the athlete’s entire race is thrown off.

Cordell once heard the 110-meter hurdles explained as 10 races in one. That’s when it all clicked for him. The controlled power, the cadence, the memorized movements, the technique between the hurdles. There are nine other athletes doing it all at the same time. Ten different rhythms at once.

Cordell, sitting trackside in the summer of 2023 after a workout, looked left and looked right, imagining his opponents.

“Yeah, you’re lined up against nine other people, but they don’t matter,” he said. “You can’t look at them, you can’t think about them. No matter what they do, it’s not going to affect you. You have to worry about yourself. Worry about getting off each hurdle and to that finish line as cleanly as possible.”

Just worry about yourself. A lesson Elizabeth had drilled into his head for all of 23 of his life so far. She FaceTimed him when she started thinking about it too much one afternoon in 2023, just before he left for Budapest to compete in the World Athletics Championships.

“Cordell, it’s kind of perfect that it’s the hurdles that are working out for you. You’ve been through a lot. We’ve been through a lot. It’s almost like you’ve been hurdling through life and you’re finally getting it all together and you’re seeing the results of everything you’ve worked for.”

Cordell laughed. This kind of talk wasn’t normal for Elizabeth, but he loved it. 

“Ok, Mom, ok. You’re spitting!”      

He’d never heard anything like that out of her, but he couldn’t deny anything she said. They’d both been through a lot.

Hurdles everywhere

Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth was scared enough to tell her mom she was pregnant. Telling her who got her pregnant was off the table.

Marcia Tinch was a stern Jamaican woman who ran a strict, religious household. She’d moved her family to Green Bay after her son, Elizabeth’s older brother, was shot and killed in Chicago. She couldn’t keep her kids completely out of harm’s way, but she could sure as hell move somewhere it was less prevalent.

Elizabeth wasn’t allowed to have much fun. No fingernail polish, no earrings, definitely no sleepovers. Marcia accepted no nonsense from Elizabeth.

A few months earlier, the man who had been dating Elizabeth’s aunt stopped by. He was tall, athletic, a member of the Green Bay Packers practice squad. He walked through the door, looking for Elizabeth’s aunt after she’d ignored his calls.

“She left town,” Elizabeth told him. “Said she wasn’t coming back.”

The man sat down, dejected. He couldn’t believe she’d bolt on him like that. He’d come by this morning to take her to breakfast, smooth things over. Now he was going to have to face his eggs and bacon alone.

Unless, he asked Elizabeth, you’d want to go to breakfast with me. At a Perkins down the street, the man bemoaned his newfound single status. “How could she do this to me?”

Then the conversation shifted. He started asking about Elizabeth. Started flirting with her. Asked if she’d like to go back to his place.

That’s how she started sneaking around with him. She’d walk to the gas station down the street after school and there he’d be, all 24 years of him, waiting.

A few months later, she felt off. Her friend took her to a Walgreens for a pregnancy test and then waited outside the bathroom door while Elizabeth took it. It was positive.

She tried to tell her mother, but only managed to relay that she’d lost her virginity. Marcia immediately scheduled a doctor’s appointment to get Elizabeth on birth control. The doctor told them to wait until Elizabeth started her period and come back to get the pills.

Elizabeth fidgeted on the ride home, determined to come clean when they got there, but again, she couldn’t do it. She was too intimidated by her.

So Elizabeth kept the news of the positive pregnancy test to herself, even when Marcia took her back to the doctor to get her birth control pills. When she told the doctor she hadn’t yet started her period, he ordered a pregnancy test.

There, sitting on an exam table under fluorescent lights, Elizabeth looked into her mother’s eyes when the result came back, and she saw immense disappointment.

The two rode back home in silence. When they walked into the house, Marcia told Elizabeth to pack her things. She wasn’t welcome under her roof.

“If you’re going to act like an adult, I’m going to treat you like one,” she told her.

In Elizabeth’s mind, the hard part was over. She’d faced her mother and she was still breathing.

Elizabeth Tinch, at 15 and pregnant, was homeless.

She didn’t know what to do or where to go. The only thing she knew for certain was that she was going to be a mother. She’d been brought up in the church. Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, she was there. Abortion or adoption were not options, she thought.

She knocked on her friend’s door and asked if she could stay the night, and then overstayed her welcome after a few weeks. She stayed on another friend’s couch until the parents nudged her out. She slept in the back seat of a friend’s car a few times.

She got a job, making enough to feed herself, determined to see it through. Then a friend of Marcia’s talked her into letting Elizabeth come back home. She was eight months pregnant.

A month later, on July 13, 2000, Elizabeth was the mother of a 7-pound, 3-ounce baby boy.

The first months of motherhood are a blur of exhaustion for anyone, let alone a 15-year-old single mother. Elizabeth tried going back to school, taking advantage of East High School’s daycare during school hours and then begging friends to watch Cordell while she worked in the evenings. She was still in her mother’s house, but Marcia refused to watch Cordell. Elizabeth would return home after 10 p.m., wondering how long she could keep it up.

Just before Cordell turned a year old, she hit a wall. She couldn’t get along with her mother and it was draining her.

She put Cordell into temporary foster care so she could enroll in Job Corps to earn her GED. She made it through in a little more than a year and moved into a room at the House of Hope shelter off Shawano Avenue, between chain motels, fast food joints and apartment buildings. 

She had a bed and a dresser, where she stashed snacks for Cordell’s visits. A few more months without her son would be worth it in the long run, she thought. If she could hold onto her job, save some money, she’d be in a better position. The counselors at Job Corps told her that moving into the shelter would put her in line for housing assistance. Her goal was three months.

Three months later, she walked out the front door of House of Hope. The woman at the front desk smiled and said she’d see her soon.

“You’ll never see me again,” Elizabeth told her. This was a one-time thing.

She had enough money saved up that she felt comfortable signing a lease on an apartment. She took a voucher to the Salvation Army and got a dining room table with two chairs, a love seat, an 18-inch TV, a milk crate to sit it on, and two twin mattresses. That was all she took with her across the street to her new two-bedroom apartment.

But it was hers. And a few days later, she brought Cordell home.

Cordell was two years old and already full of an inextinguishable energy. That first night in their new home, Elizabeth lay on the twin mattress in her bedroom and looked at the popcorn ceiling, listening to Cordell’s rapid footsteps as he sprinted around the tiny apartment. Back and forth from her mattress to his.

She was tired and she wanted to be annoyed, but she could only laugh. And thank the lord they didn’t have a second-floor apartment with downstairs neighbors.

Cordell remembers bits and pieces of those early days, when it was just the two of them. When all of the parenting fell squarely on Elizabeth’s broad shoulders, the same she passed down to her son.

And parenting Cordell could be a chore.

By the time Cordell was in elementary school, his rampant energy was a problem. He couldn’t sit still and he couldn’t stop talking. He was a hyper, happy kid. The only thing bigger than his smile was his motor.

His teachers at Lincoln Elementary tried everything they knew to try. They gave him chewing gum at first, apparently hoping contracting jaw muscles would burn enough energy to get Cordell to calm down. When that didn’t work, they brought out an inflatable exercise ball to replace his chair. Maybe incessant bouncing would work.

The principal finally called Elizabeth to come in for a meeting. She drove to the school and sat at a lunchroom table with Cordell, the principal and a counselor. As they started going through the issues they were having with Cordell, Elizabeth interrupted.

I know, I know, she told them, but I’m doing everything I can. It’s hard being a single mother and I’m just trying to keep him fed and happy.

“Wait,” the principal interjected. “You’re Cordell’s mother? We thought you were his sister.”

Elizabeth had recently started dating Tyler Simmons, a gentle man with kind eyes and patience for days. He bonded with Cordell over Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Bucks games. One afternoon, Tyler walked into the living room to see Cordell sitting inches from the TV screen as a football game played, his eyes darting back and forth, reading the defense and anticipating the offensive play.

“Why are you watching like that,” Tyler asked.

Six-year-old Cordell looked up. “It’s the best way for me to understand it.”

So when Elizabeth came to Tyler after the meeting with Cordell’s teacher, searching for an answer, Tyler had one.

“I think he needs to play sports,” Tyler said. “It would be good for him.”

Elizabeth enrolled Cordell in the flag football program at the West Side YMCA. Cordell fell in love immediately. He could run all day and nobody could catch him. It was the first thing he liked enough that Elizabeth could use as collateral. If you get in trouble this week at school, Cordell, you can’t go to the Y.

He played football there until he reached junior high, when he could start playing at school. When he got to Bay Port High School, no matter the sport, he was the best on the team.

He played AAU basketball with future NBA All-Star point guard Tyrese Halliburton. He won state titles and sat records on the track. He dominated on the football field.

That’s when Elizabeth’s lessons were first needed.

Cordell’s first taste of failure came as a senior in high school, when he was caught vaping on school grounds. It was his second athletics code violation and it made him ineligible for the state championships, where he was hoping to defend his long jump title and shoot for three more in the high jump, triple jump and hurdles.

Elizabeth sat him down and repeated the words her grandmother, Dorothy Miller, had always told her.

“Don’t sit for too long, or you might never get back up,” she said.

Despite not finishing his senior track season, Cordell was still in demand. He signed to run track and play football at the University of Minnesota.

He arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, with wide eyes and big goals, but a few weeks of practice for both sports left him exhausted and wondering if he’d made the right decision.  

He talked with his coaches and decided to quit both teams.

“It’s too much,” he told them. “I’m not having fun anymore and these are things that should be fun.”

It was the first time he thought his athletics career could be over.

But he didn’t sit for long. He followed a Minnesota coach who took a job on the track staff at the University of Kansas. He moved to Lawrence and found the passion he’d lost in St. Paul.

He was a standout for the Jayhawks, winning the Big 12 title in the hurdles and finishing third in the long jump while being named the conference's freshman of the year.

He was happy.

And then his biological father reached out to him. He doesn’t really remember what the message said. He was dismissing it as he read it.

For 19 years, Cordell hadn’t heard from him. Elizabeth gave him the opportunity when he was old enough. This is who your father is, she told him. If you want to reach out to him, I won’t be mad.

Elizabeth had spoken to Cordell’s father only once after he left Green Bay for Texas when he found out she was pregnant. When Cordell was four, she decided she should establish paternity. She heard the man’s voice on a call with the court during the process and not since then.

Cordell never felt the need to reach out. Tyler was his dad. He didn’t feel like he was missing anything in his life. So the message from his biological father took him by surprise, even if it was innocuous enough.

He let Cordell know he was proud of him. Cordell was doing big things and he was watching from Texas. He was there if Cordell wanted to talk.

Cordell thought: I’m 19 and I'm at a Power Five school and I’m Freshman of the Year and now you want to reach out and tell me you’re proud.  

Cordell ignored the message.

Things are going well right now. I don’t need the distraction.

But the good vibes didn’t last. A few days later, an issue with his tuition was brought to his attention. He wasn’t on full scholarship and he owed money. He wouldn’t be able to compete at the NCAA regionals.

It all left him in a funk. He stayed in Lawrence as his teammates competed at regionals and nationals. He sulked, trying to decide how to proceed.

For the second time in less than a year, he quit. And for the second time, he followed someone to a new school.

This time, it was a Kansas teammate who was heading to a junior college. A few months later, he was back in Green Bay. Probably for good this time, he thought.

Cordell made it through the pandemic in Green Bay and started picking up odd jobs. He delivered meals for DoorDash and sold plasma when the food orders were slow.

Tyler got him a job at Georgia-Pacific, running a paper machine, and then hooked him up with some friends who owned a moving company.

He got a job with U.S. Cellular at a store in Suamico, a few miles north of Green Bay. There, in a storefront that shared a parking lot with a Starbucks and a pizza joint, he sold customers the latest iPhones and Samsung Galaxies and Google Pixels. And he was good at it. His confident smile and easy conversational skills played well.

He fell into a rhythm. He went to work, sometimes went to the gym in the evening, and drove home to eat dinner by himself.

“Maybe this is my life now,” he told Elizabeth one night. “It’s not exciting, but I’m not complaining. A lot of folks have it a lot worse.”

But the itch never went away. Cordell stayed in shape with gym workouts, pickup basketball games and the diet of a man who’d competed in Division I athletics.

In the summer of 2021, while he was back living with Elizabeth, he sat with Tyler and watched the NCAA track nationals. He edged forward on the couch as the finalists lined up for the 110-meter hurdles. The muscle memory kicked in and he could feel himself at the starting line. The tunnel vision returned. The starting gun fired and Cordell felt the rhythm of the race in his core.

The winner broke the tape at the finish line at 13.25 seconds and Cordell sank back into the couch. Tyler was looking at him strangely.

“You think you can still hurdle?” he asked.

“I know I can,” Cordell told him, mostly confident, partly hopeful. “I can right now.”

So Cordell, Tyler, and two of his sisters loaded into Cordell’s car and drove to his old stomping grounds, Bay Port High School. They walked to the track and set up the hurdles, Cordell jogged over to the starting line while the other three gathered at the finish line.

“Fourteen seconds!” Tyler called.

Cordell ran through some quick warmups. Fourteen seconds? He hadn’t jumped a hurdle in more than a year. A 13.38 was good enough to be an Olympic finalist in 2021! What the hell?.

He stretched a bit more, got into position, listened for Tyler’s clap, and took off. The muscle memory was still there. He heard his sisters cheering.  He finished a clean run and circled back to the group. Tyler was laughing.

Cordell had run a hand-timed 13.5 seconds. If he’d competed in the national championships that day, he’d have placed fifth overall.

It wasn’t an official time, of course, but–having not run for a year and a half– Cordell had gotten off the couch, warmed up for five minutes, and then clocked a time equal to the top hurdlers in the country.

“Damn, I’ve still got it,” he thought.

Cordell had trouble sitting in one place in the weeks and months after that race. He was starting to think maybe he wasn’t done with track.

In November 2022, a former teammate reached out to Cordell. He’d landed at Pittsburg State and he liked it. “Hear me out,” he said. “The coaching staff is great. The facilities are nicer than you’d expect for a Division II school. They compete for national championships.

“I think you could do good things here,” he told Cordell.

That’s all it took to change Cordell’s commute thinking daydreams from “This isn’t so bad,” to “I think I still have something left to prove.”

He talked to his bosses at U.S. Cellular, who didn’t know he’d once been a track star. He was thinking about going back to school, he told them. He would hate to leave and lose the opportunity they’d given him, but it might be his last chance.

“Go,” they said. They told him to go. “U.S. Cellular will always be here and you’ll always be welcome back. Track won’t always be an opportunity for you.”

A little more than a month later, in the first few days of 2023, Cordell flew to Kansas City, where Pitt State assistant coach Jesse Miller waited for him. They got in Miller’s car and drove south, through rolling hills and fields of winter wheat and miles of nothing until they damn near drove into Oklahoma.

Cordell unpacked the few clothes and personal belongings he’d brought with him, walked around the campus and wondered if he’d be able to pick up where he left off.

It didn’t take him long to find out.

He took the Division II track world by storm, winning national championships in both the 60-meter hurdles and the high jump during the indoor season. Then, he started the outdoor season at the Clyde Littlefield Relays at the University of Texas. In his first official 110-meter hurdles race in more than three years, he ran a 13.33 and took second in a field of top Division I athletes.

He smashed school and Division II records that spring and then went to Pueblo, Colorado, in late May and won national championships in the hurdles, long jump and high jump, a performance that went viral on social media.

Then, on a June day in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the Trackwired Arkansas Grand Prix, he ran the 110 hurdles in 12.96 seconds.

In November 2022, he was working for U.S. Cellular in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Seven months later, he was among the best hurdlers on the planet.

He turned pro and decided to set up camp in Pittsburg, Kansas, training with his college coaches in the kind of quiet you’d expect in a 20,000-person town surrounded by farmland. There are no distractions in southeastern Kansas, he says. He can focus on the task at hand and nothing else.

He landed a sponsorship from NIKE. It’s enough for him to cover living expenses and for him to buy his first car, a brand-new blue Dodge Hornet.

His days were a simple routine. He trained, he ate, he slept, he played Call of Duty and then he did it all again.

In July 2023, at the USA Championships in Eugene, Cordell lined up for his first race as a professional and took second, behind two-time defending champion Daniel Roberts.

He crossed the finish line and was whisked away by Team USA officials for post-race processing. He signed forms and stood still as he was measured for a uniform. He watched as they booked his flight for Budapest and then held his composure as they handed him his Team USA speed suit.

It was dark by the time he left, got out of the stadium and got back to his hotel. He threw his bag on the bed, ripped open the zippers and grabbed the red, white and blue speed suit.

He quickly changed, stood in front of the full-length mirror and took a picture as a wide smile engulfed his face. He texted it to his mom and Tyler and wiped away a happy tear.

Cordell spent the next year traveling the world. Then made it to the semifinals of the World Championships in Budapest, clipping a few hurdles and narrowly missing the finals. He flew from Budapest to Xiamen, China, for a Wanda Diamond League race and then made it back to the States for the Prefontaine Classic.

He took a few weeks off to prepare for the indoor season, where he ran in Boston and New York City. He felt sluggish at times. Not himself. He was used to an offseason, not the constant grind of being a professional athlete.

His times suffered as the Olympic trials neared. His best race of the spring came on a return trip to Xiamen, when he ran a 13.10. The rest of the time, he struggled to run times that would compete for an Olympic spot.

He landed in Eugene for the trials in mid-June, rested and hopeful. He worked out and got reacclimated with the environment and the track.

Elizabeth and Tyler rented a house for the week and set up a base camp. Cordell would come over in the evenings, Tyler would fire up the grill and they’d sit around and talk like it was another day in Green Bay.

Elizabeth saw Cordell relax in a way she hadn’t noticed in months. They were there together, in the moment, with no more work to do. The moment had arrived.

Cordell eased through the first round and the semifinals, earning his spot in the finals. Ten hurdles and 110 meters away from the Olympics.

He started strong in the finals, hanging with Holloway, the three-time World Champion and Olympic silver medalist. Halfway through, he was in position to make his move. He’d always been a closer.

But he clipped the final three hurdles. It slowed him down just enough to knock him into fourth place, 70 milliseconds too slow.

NBC Nightly News had profiled him a few days before, teasing his story in advance of an Olympic miracle. But now, NBC’s cameras ignored him as Holloway, Crittenden and Roberts celebrated, slapping each other on the back.

Tinch disappeared into the crowd and found Elizabeth.

Two weeks later, Cordell returns a call.

It’s his 24th birthday and his plane has just landed in Wisconsin. He’s already competed in three races since the Olympic trials, the first, as cruel fate would have it, in Paris.

He’s back on the horse, back in the starting blocks.

The way he sees it, he didn’t run his best race at the trials and still ran a time that would have won him a national championship in any country but the United States. He’s young and hungry and can only improve.

A few days earlier, before a race in Monaco, he’d set up a phone call and suggested 4:30 p.m., the time his place was scheduled to land.

The trip ran a little long and he missed the initial call, so as he waits for his luggage, he pulls his phone out and dials.

This is not the Cordell Tinch who walked away from the sport three times.

This is the Cordell who tells you he’ll do something and then does it. So believe him when he says he’ll be at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

He’s heard it all his life, don’t sit for too long. You might never get up.

“I don’t have a choice. There’s nothing else I want,” he says. “I have to keep running.”