Of course they called her Chicken Legs. Ninth graders are the worst. Clearly, the girls on Los Angeles Baptist High’s track team were just waiting to pounce on Allyson Felix, all stems and a cheeseburger shy of skinny back then. A nickname like that makes clear she was more eggbeater than world beater, nobody’s standout sprinter. But it didn’t take her long to turn that insult into an aspiration.
Here’s the thing about chickens: they’re hard as hell to catch. (Rocky could barely pin one down in a dirt alley, remember?) Once Felix started breezing through 270lbs deadlifts at age 14 before going on to replace Marion Jones in the California high school record books, there was no more belittling this rare athlete. There was only watching her run so fast and far from all who dared doubt her that you could halfway think she was flying.
On Saturday evening at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium the American left her haters even farther in the dust. The most successful sprinter on a superstar relay team, the 35-year-old Felix took the baton from 22-year-old 400m hurdles champion Sydney McLaughlin for the second leg of the 4x400 women’s final and ran a blistering split that set up 31-year-old 400m silver medalist Dalilah Muhammad to open a commanding lead. After Muhammad handed off to 800m golden girl Athing Mu, the US cruised to a victory by more than three seconds over Poland and Jamaica.
Just the night prior in the women’s 400m final Felix would claw her way around the outside-most lane and pip Jamaica’s Stephenie Ann McPherson to bronze. At the end of both races Felix could not have seemed more unfazed as she sat off to the side of the track with her elbows on her knees, looking for all the world like a woman waiting for a bus. It was almost as if she thought there was more running to do. Never mind that this was her final go-round at the Olympics.
Altogether, Felix leaves Tokyo with two medals in this Olympiad and 11 for her career (including seven golds), making her the most decorated American track and field athlete ever – more decorated even than the estimable Carl Lewis. “I’m not too wrapped up in winning more medals,” Felix said after her 400m bronze. “I think a lot of times I tied my work to what happens at these championships, and I didn’t want to do that this time around.”
It’s worth reminding: Before Lewis became infamous for an off-key anthem rendition and history’s worst first pitch, he was the Olympic standard – dominating the long jump, 100m and 200m for 10 career medals, seven of them individual golds. Sports Illustrated, the IOC and the IAAF are just a few who recognized Lewis as the premier athlete of the 20th century. But perhaps even more significant than that, he laid claim to the distinction that matters most on track: world’s fastest man.
But where Lewis was an electric, sui generis performer with a flair for the dramatic, Felix is more like track and field’s Tom Brady, astounding with her physical durability and dependability in the clutch. She sticks to what she does best (the 200m and 400m), puts her head down and quietly goes about her business, gliding about with a technical grace that bespeaks years of training both unsparing and unseen. When the lights are brightest and the medals are on the table, you just know Felix is running away with something.
And yet: in a sport where peacocks and chest-beaters abound, Felix stands out for her classic understatement. Any pretentious notions about her being some cold automaton programmed to aggregate accolades disappear the moment she smiles or speaks. Really, Felix’s ability to remain humble and magnanimous regardless of the result or situation might be her most winning quality. And you could just as easily chalk that up to her character as to her profound Christian faith. As role models go Chicken Legs is the ultimate two-piece combo: transcendent and relatable, a physical wonder mom with washboard abs and a C-section scar, a special egg in the mold of the great Jackie Joyner-Kersee – which was perhaps inevitable given the close family ties; not only is the great heptathlete a longtime mentor, but her husband, Bob, is Felix’s coach.
On top of all that Felix has her own mind and the courage of her convictions. From pushing for pay equity to standing up for working mothers to marching in protests against anti-black racism, Felix does not hesitate to set down a spiked foot on the toughest issues. And when it came to the discussion of mental health in sports and at the Olympics, she was among the first into the fray. But the thing that may well define her particular legacy is the stance she took without speaking. In the decades track and field was at its dirtiest, as Jones and other Balco patients were taking down one record after another, Felix remained the clean queen whose times were eminently trustworthy. Watching her chug away with that reaching, long-legged stride (especially in these last two races), you don’t just believe she’s giving it her all – but that it’s all her, too.
The idea of American exceptionalism is a shaky proposition even in the best of times. But if ever there were an athlete who epitomized it, who better than the wispy little Black girl from Santa Clarita who met and defied every lofty expectation of her on the way to setting an impossibly high standard of excellence. And for as relentlessly as that original high school impression stalks her – through marriage, childbirth and a whole-ass career – well, who can’t relate to that, too. In the race between her good name and her plucky handle, there will always be a rush to point out which came first. But Felix at least can say she got the last laugh in the end.
