Athletes coached by Bob Kersee have won nearly 30 Olympic gold medals and his current group might be his best yet.
By his own admission, he has been a wanderer all his life, determined since childhood to chart his own course through the world.
And when McLaughlin-Levrone broke the world record for a fourth time in 14 months, running a Beamon-esue 50.68 seconds at the World Championships in Eugene, Kersee was watching from his hotel room nearly 2 miles from the track.
Kersee-coached athletes have won 43 Olympic medals, 28 of them gold, and 55 World Championships medals, 40 gold. Athletes coached by Kersee currently hold four individual world records – the 35-year-old 100 and 200 marks belonging to Florence Griffith-Joyner, Kersee’s late sister-in-law, McLaughlin’s 400 hurdles standard and the heptathlon record set by Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Bobby’s wife, also in 1988.
“People expect me to stand up here and be strong and I’m not,” Kersee said, referring to his speaking at Foster’s memorial. “This is a best friend, beyond an athlete, that I’m getting ready to lose.”“I’ll be honest, I have a therapist,” said Kersee, who splits time between Los Angeles and his wife’s hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois. “I believe in mental health. I preach mental toughness and dealing with things. Dealing with emotions, dealing with depression. I stopped drinking.
Kersee first lept into America’s living rooms at the 1984 Olympic Games. Brisco had just completed a victory lap around the Coliseum after winning the 400 for her first gold medal and was celebrating with her husband Alvin Hooks, an NFL player, and her young son Alvin Jr. when Kersee jumped on Brisco, sending them crashing to the ground.
Kersee, however, has his critics, who take issue with the often in-your-face coaching style of a man who paid his way through Long Beach State by working the graveyard shift at local youth detention centers and prisons.“Everybody can’t be coached by Bobby, I will say that,” Devers said. “It takes a certain person to take him for what he is. But understand anything he’s saying to you, it’s for you.”“I didn’t know who Bob Kersee was,” she said. “I was 17 years old.
“I just raised my voice Tuesday with what I did not like with Keni Harrison over the hurdles,” Kersee said. “I told her, ‘Let me tell you one goddamn thing this ain’t going to work with me. “I think that’s a very appropriate analogy,” Boldon said. “Those of us who know Allyson when she made that switch to Bobby went, ‘Oooh, OK.’ Like we can’t see it, but we’d like to see it. And then it worked and then it thrived and then I think you realized that Allyson’s personality is sort of exactly what Bobby needed and Bobby was what Allyson needed and it fit. They were an odd couple but you can’t argue with the results.
Mu followed her boyfriend Brandon Miller, a half-miler who had signed up for Kersee’s group, to Los Angeles from College Station where they had attended Texas A&M. She soon joined the group as well last fall. Harrison and Prandini joined around the same time. “Bobby’s camp is not a democracy,” Boldon said. “I think a lot of younger kids , ‘Yeah, I’m going to go to Coach A or Coach B and I’m going to have 50 percent input’ and Bobby’s old school and old school coaches just don’t really care about some neophyte’s opinion. Boy or girl, ‘I’ve forgotten more about this sport than you know. So I’m the one who will be driving the car.’”“I think that’s a good point,” Kersee said. “Because this group, we talked about it over and over.
Coach Bob Kersee is pictured during a press conference ahead of the Memorial Van Damme Diamond League meeting athletics event, in Brussels, August 30, 2022. “I look at Sydney, she has all that. She has the athletic talent of a Jackie, speed of a Florence. She’s at 50-point in the 400 hurdles, so she has the speed, the endurance and now a good amount of aerobic base work. I just think that she has the natural ability to run under 48 seconds.”“No question in my mind,” Boldon said. “Absolutely no question in my mind. It can be a two-prong question. Does he know how to get Sydney to 47.60? I believe yes.
“I think it’s understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it,” said McLaughlin-Levrone. “A lot of coaches just teach you how to run fast. And then from there, it’s like you figure out the race plan. But if you understand the event, if you understand how to break it down piece by piece, you’re no longer just going out there running, hoping that you win, you’re executing a plan that’s in place. And you can go back in that plan and figure out why things didn’t go properly.
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