Valarie Allman

The throwers at her school had an annual spaghetti dinner, and they said that anybody who tried their discipline could come to the dinner. “Weirdly, food was my incentive,” Allman remembered, and when she went to throw the discus, she had discovered how familiar it felt to dancing.

“I think it’s a second-and-a-half dance that you do hundreds of times and it’s really repetitive, but gosh-darn, I do think it’s a dance. It’s poetry. It’s balance. It’s grace. It’s power,” Allman said, and all of those virtues together are what defined her performance Monday night to give the U.S. track and field team its first gold medal of the Tokyo Olympics — and its first gold in women’s discus since 2008.

“That was the best spaghetti dinner of my entire life,” she said, “and it led to this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/08/02/valarie-allman-discus-olympics/