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Two-time Olympian coaches Ramona High hurdlers

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Patty Weirich, Ramona High School’s assistant coach for hurdles the past two track and field seasons, has an impressive history — she competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympic Games.

“It still stays with you, the feeling, the emotions, the sense of pride to be able to represent the USA and to be at the Olympics,” Weirich said 48 years after her first Olympic appearance.

“It was a very exciting time,” Weirich said. “For me it was getting to meet other athletes from all over the world who were there with the same mindset.”

Weirich was Patty Van Wolvelaere when she ran in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and Patty Johnson when she competed in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Her father was in the Navy when she was born in San Diego, and after spending some of her earliest childhood in Japan, the family moved to the Seattle area where her mother was raised.

She was 15 when she began competing in races. Girls interscholastic sports did not exist when she was in ninth grade in Renton, Wash., in 1965. The Girls Athletic Association was more comparable to intramural events. Her ninth-grade physical education teacher saw a newspaper article about a co-ed track meet and entered the team.

“She said: ‘You might be in the next Olympic Games,’” Weirich said. “Three years later as an 18-year-old I was on the Olympic team.”

In March 1968, she ran in an indoor meet at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena and set a world record of 7.4 seconds in the 60-yard hurdles, although she noted that all other nations conducted their meets using meters rather than yards for distances.

“I just took to them naturally,” she said of the hurdles. “I was a good sprinter. Hurdlers have to be sprinters first.”

The 1968 Olympic Team Trials were held at Mount San Antonio College. Weirich finished second in the 80-meter hurdles, allowing her to be part of the United States Olympic Team at Mexico City.

The 1968 Summer Olympics may be best known for its political controversies. American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute on the victory podium, and pressure from nations with black athletes led to the exclusion of South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics. The track and field events at University Olympic Stadium are also remembered for the 7,365-foot altitude of the track.

“It didn’t affect my race because mine was the shortest race,” Weirich said.

The Olympic hurdlers trained for the Mexico City altitude in Los Alamos, N.M.

Weirich had a time of 10.5 seconds in the 80-meter hurdles, placing her fourth behind two Australians and a Chinese hurdler.

“Coming in fourth was amazing,” she said.

The time also set an American record.

“I still have that record,” Weirich said. “The next year they went to the 100-meter hurdles.”

The 80-meter hurdles were not shown on American television, although one of Weirich’s aunts lived in Yuma, Ariz., and was able to watch the event on a Mexican channel.

Weirich’s activities between the 1968 and 1972 Olympics included twice-yearly track and field competitions between the United States and the Soviet Union. She won the gold medal in the 1971 Pan American Games, which were held in Cali, Colombia, and set an American record of 13.1 seconds in the 100-meter hurdles.

The conversion process from hand-held times to electronic times adds 24/100 of a second to hand-held times, so Weirich once again set an American record at the 1972 Olympic Games with a time of 13.26 seconds. That placed her ninth and eliminated her during the semifinals.

“The Germans and the Russians and the Bulgarians were all competing with steroids,” she said.

Weirich noted that she had defeated her Soviet counterparts in the earlier USA-USSR meets.

“It was starting to happen in Eastern Bloc countries,” she said of steroids during the 1972 Olympics.

She added that some distance runners in the 1972 Olympics were resorting to blood doping (self-transfusions of fresh blood), although that was not yet banned.

“It’s always a cat and mouse game,” she said of performance enhancement activities.

Her first husband was stationed at Camp Pendleton, and she lived in San Clemente between 1970 and the 1972 Olympics.

“I trained by myself for two years,” she said.

The preliminary heats for the women’s 100-meter hurdles were held on Sept. 4, 1972. On the morning of Sept. 5, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli men’s area of the Olympic Village and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.

“That was the first real terrorist attack on a world stage,” Weirich said.

Ironically, the Germans sought to downplay political activity, since during the previous Olympic Games in Germany in 1936 Adolf Hitler used the Olympics for political propaganda and the Berlin games had a notable military presence.

“There was really not much security at all,” Weirich said.

The 1972 Olympic athletes and coaches were soon made aware of the massacre of the Israelis.

“You didn’t know where that was going to end,” Weirich said.

Weirich had become friends with Israeli hurdler Esther Roth, who survived the massacre but whose coach was killed. They had both competed in the preliminaries on Sept. 4. The Olympic Games were postponed due to the massacre, so no competition took place Sept. 6. Weirich ran the semifinals Sept. 7.

“You didn’t expect something like that to happen at the Olympic Games,” she said. “It was pretty hard to concentrate when all that was going on.”

Roth had qualified for the semifinals but did not compete, as the surviving Israeli athletes had been evacuated. Roth later returned to running and trained with Weirich when she was competing for the University of Southern California.

After Weirich and her first husband divorced in 1973, she returned to Washington briefly before moving to Oceanside and attending Mira Costa College from 1973-75. She competed for the La Jolla Track Club, which became Wilt’s Wonder Women in 1974, when basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, who had also been a high jumper at the University of Kansas, became involved to honor his sisters.

“He had two sisters he said were better athletes than he was,” Weirich said.

In 1975, at the age of 25, Weirich became the first woman to receive a track scholarship to USC.

“For me it was huge,” she said.

She participated in the Olympic Team Trials for the 1976 Olympic Games but was recovering from an Achilles tendon injury. The top three hurdlers competed at the Olympics in Montreal, and she finished fifth in the trials. She competed for USC until 1978, and in her final year she had a time of 13.14 seconds, the fastest of her career.

Although the United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Olympic Team Trials were held. An injury curtailed Weirich’s participation, and she retired from running.

“I got to travel all of the world. That was the best part of that,” Weirich said of her running career.

She returned to Oceanside after her graduation from USC. She initially planned to continue her career as a college coach and began graduate studies at San Diego State University. Her plans for a master’s degree lasted one semester. When she noticed a flier in the Physical Education Department about the City of San Diego Fire Department recruiting women, she applied and was hired in February 1981. She spent the next 24 years with the fire department.

“I was able to take all that training and put it into something new,” she said. “Without all that it would have been a very difficult job to do.”

Weirich met her current husband when he was assigned to Fire Station 21 in Pacific Beach and she was filling in for a Station 21 firefighter who was on vacation. They moved to Ramona in 1983.

Weirich joined the Ramona High track and field coaching staff in 1996, when Sherri Edwards was head coach. Edwards took a hiatus from coaching to raise her sons, and the demands of Weirich’s fire department job made coaching too much of a hardship at the time.

After Weirich retired from the fire department, she returned as one of Edwards’ coaches in 2015.

“It’s a passion of mine,” she said of coaching. “I have a lot to share. I’ve really enjoyed being there the last two years. The coaching staff has just been a really wonderful experience for me.”

Her current Olympics experience is as a television spectator.

“Right now when it’s going on it’s pretty fun,” she said before the 2016 summer games ended.

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