Joanna Hayes possesses a soulfulness beyond her 27 years.
Joanna Hayes possesses a soulfulness beyond her 27 years.
After Joanna Hayes crossed the finish line of the women’s 100-meter hurdles in an Olympic-record 12.37 seconds in Athens, Greece last month, she fell to the ground before running to the stands to accept congratulations.
She had just beaten the Olympic record by .01 of a second and won a gold medal—both more than enough reason to fall down. But her father, a first-hand observer of the race, said she fell down out of shock because she knew she was going to win—and she knew exactly what her winning time would be.
In fact, he said, prior to the race she sent an E-mail to a friend that predicted her winning time as 12.38 seconds, and then sent another E-mail that read, “No, it will be 12.37 seconds.”
Not many people measure their lives in such exact increments, but for Hayes, who lives life—literally—in the fast lane, there is no room for mistakes.
Ironically, 27-year old Hayes will be the first to admit that she has made her share of errors in life. And in typical Hayes fashion, with a healthy mix of humility and pride, she looks at her newfound fame in terms of how it will help others not make the same mistakes.
“Setting an example is very hard because when you get into a position where people are watching and the spotlight is on you, we are all human, we all have human error and make mistakes so it is hard to try to be perfect,” she said by phone, in a voice tinged with a deep soulfulness that usually accompanies a much older speaker.
There is no doubt that Hayes’ intuition is strong. Not just for predicting race times, but also for understanding her place in the world. She knows that as an Olympic champion she is immediately catapulted into a new status as a role model. And she knows exactly what she wants to do with this newfound influence.
“It comes easily for [my family] to help people and to try to treat people fairly,” she said.
In the Genes
Perhaps Hayes’ natural inclination to help the less fortunate is a gift from her father. Los Angeles-based homeless advocate Ted Hayes founded Dome Village in 1993 as an outreach program for the chronically homeless. The encampment, located beneath the Harbor Freeway, offers residents temporary housing in Plexiglas-domed structures with heat and electricity for up to two years.
Ted Hayes not only labored to help Los Angeles’ homeless population, he also joined them. In 1984, Hayes left his wife and four young children, including eight-year-old Joanna, to live on the streets of downtown’s Skid Row area.
As a child, Joanna struggled with her father’s decision to throw himself into his work in this manner, but now as an adult, she said, she understands his mission.
“Of course, there were rough times and times when I wished my dad could have been there,” Hayes said. “Whatever the situation is, you do want your father there more often, but he was still in our lives and he still put our needs first every time he possibly could. He had a hard job and a hard role and it wasn’t an easy decision that he made and obviously, there were times when I didn’t understand it.”
And Hayes senior did find time to make it to many of his daughter’s high school and college track meets.
As Joanna grew older and traveled to compete in track and field events, she saw the dire situation of homeless people around the world and came to understand her father’s decision—and even credit it for her own success.
“The older you get, the more you understand why things are the way they are and honestly, I don’t know what my life would be like if he hadn’t done what he did,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about winning the gold medal in the Olympics because maybe my life would have taken a different turn had he done something different with his life.”
Ted Hayes could not be more proud of his daughter—whom he and his gang at Dome Village affectionately refer to as Fly Dove—for her accomplishments both on the track and off. “People keep coming up to me and saying, ‘The fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree,’” he said.
Joanna believes that her father’s penchant for helping people rubbed off on her, although she hesitates to label herself an ‘activist.’ Prior to training for this year’s Olympics, she worked for two years as a children’s mentor at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Boys & Girls Club in East St. Louis. A fellow gold medalist, Joyner-Kersee set up the foundation in 1988 to give something back to her Illinois hometown. The Club promotes sports, including track and field, as a positive influence in children’s lives.
Hayes remembers living in East St. Louis as a rewarding yet challenging time in her life. She loves children, calling them “innocent,” and “perfect in my eyes,” and gladly shared what slim resources she had with them—time, money, even her home.
Hayes recalled that Ashley and Jessica, two girls from the Club, often asked if they could come over and spend the night.
“We always had to eat the $1 chicken sandwiches at McDonald’s, we shared fries and we all got water,” Hayes said. “[But] they didn’t care. To them it didn’t matter what we ate, it didn’t matter if we ate—they just wanted to hang out with me.”
Hayes said she still volunteers at a Los Angeles-based Boys and Girls Club when she has time.
It seems to be a Hayes family philosophy to throw yourself into your work. Just as Ted Hayes chose voluntary homelessness to help the homeless and Joanna chose to donate her free time and scarce dollars to needy children, Joanna’s mother, Arlene, (who also works at a homeless shelter) devoted herself to her daughter’s running career.
In high school, when Joanna’s athletic gift became obvious, her mother moved the family to Riverside so that Joanna could train with Coach Charles Leathers at North High School. Clearly, the Hayes’s have an unusual propensity for hard work and sacrifice—the exact skills required to become an Olympic champion.
The Path to the Gold
According to Hayes, her success results from a combination of physical discipline and spiritual perseverance. A runner’s body is the tool of her trade, and Hayes is a self-proclaimed scholar of healthy living. She pays close attention to what she eats, but unlike the majority of dieters, one of the goals of Hayes’ strict eating regimen is to keep weight on. Not only does she expend great amounts of energy in training, but her fast metabolism makes it difficult to maintain her desired weight of 130 pounds.
She usually sticks to organic beef, chicken, yams, brown rice and lots of vegetables purchased in almost daily visits to a natural food store. For Hayes, preparing a meal is a long process.
“I spend a lot of time cooking and making sure it’s right,” she said. “And not everybody wants to eat with me because, well, I’m going to cook at my house and you can come over if you like, but you probably won’t like [the food]—there is almost no seasoning in it, there is almost no taste. For me it tastes great, and it’s healthy.”
Except for an occasional glass of wine, Hayes avoids alcohol and never touches sugar, candy, caffeine or soda. She tries to stay away from dairy, although she loves—and craves—ice cream and admits to eating quite a bit. And the Olympic champion indulges her chocolate passion on occasion, too.
“I guess once a month I eat some chocolate or something. I can’t really control it. I am a woman,” Hayes joked, letting out a whoop of laughter.
Hayes’ devotion to her spiritual path, however, is no laughing matter. An ardent believer in God (whom she refers to by the masculine pronoun “he”), Hayes believes that despite her natural athletic talent and intensive training, without God’s help she would not be an Olympic champion.
“People say, ‘It’s about what you do, it’s about how hard you work and that’s how you get everything,’ and I understand it’s about what we do and how hard we work, but God is a major focus in my life,” Hayes said. “Without him, I couldn’t work hard and I couldn’t run fast. He blessed me with my talent.”
Hayes also attributes some credit for her success to both her maternal and paternal grandmothers—and not only in the traditional sense. Along with the more conventional grandmotherly gifts of love, support and just the right mixture of genes, Joanna believes that the spirits of her grandmothers—neither of whom is still living—keep her on her feet.
“I run hurdles and hurdles are a dangerous event and one of the girls and I bumped during the race, but I just kept focused and kept going,” Hayes said of her Olympic victory. “I feel like [my grandmothers] are my angels, one on each side—they keep me balanced.”
Perhaps the ultimate symbol of Hayes’ inspiration and influences is the much-publicized tattoo on her upper right thigh. The central image of a dove represents Hayes’ unusual middle name, Dove, which she inherited from her paternal grandmother, Annie Dove Hayes.
And although she later discovered that athletes usually wait until they have made an Olympic team to get an Olympic tattoo, the Olympic rings above the dove on her thigh have served to symbolize her goal for the past eight years.
A banner of “motivational scripture” running along the top of the tattoo quotes something her parents often repeated to her before competitions: “He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet: and setteth me upon my high places.”
When she made the Olympic team, Hayes made one final addition to her tattoo. Prior to that time, she said, her dream had been in black and white. She had the rings colored in before heading off to Athens.
And as Hayes pointed out, the tattoo turned out to be quite prophetic.
Now, Olympic dream realized, Joanna Hayes knows exactly what comes next, just as she knew what her winning time would be. She wants to keep running. She wants to keep winning. She wants to keep working with the homeless. She wants to keep working with children. And she wants to return to Los Angeles to see her family, including its newest addition—her niece and namesake, Goldyn Dove Hayes, born two days after Joanna’s victory and named for the color of her aunt’s medal.
Co-creator of spoken-word poetry forum, Drumwordspokenbeat, Lea Silverman is a Los Angeles-based journalist.