On Running: Steve Nearman

Chances are that Sarah Bowman will not make the Olympic track and field team that goes to Beijing next month.

But don’t count out the rising Tennessee senior from achieving her Olympic goal, a dream she has had since she was a kid.

On Sunday, the 20-year-old from Warrenton, Va., competes in the 1,500-meter final at the U.S. Olympic track and field team trials in Eugene, Ore. While Bowman was a huge star in high school and now in college, she leaped into elite status last month at the NCAA outdoor meet.

She sliced 6.5 seconds off her personal best in the 1,500.

That effort also shaved more than a second of Alisa Harvey’s 22-year-old school record.

Her time of 4:07.50 moved her to within half a second of an Olympic qualifying time. But more so, it moved her into the No. 5 spot on the U.S. elite list for 2008 performances in the 1,500 and put her in contention with America’s top middle-distance runners.

This past week, Bowman sailed through the prelims and semis, grabbing the last qualifying spot in her heat for the final. She will have to contend with 11 other women hungry to achieve the dream of Olympic stardom, including top Americans Shannon Rowbury, Lindsey Gallo, Amy Mortimer, Christin Wurth and Sara Hall.

Even if Bowman slides into the top three, she still will need to run the Olympic A qualifying time of 4:07.00 in the final, another personal best.

Bowman is used to challenges, but she also is used to success.

Since she first started competing in track at age 11 after competitive soccer the previous five years, she has won nearly every top honor along with way.

At 13, she was first at Virginia’s Hershey state track meet in Charlottesville, then 24 hours later she won the Amateur Athletic Union’s Region II track championship in Gaithersburg, then the AAU Junior Olympics in Orlando, Fla.

Just after her senior year at Fauquier High School in the summer of 2005, she served the leading role in what high school track Web site DyeStat pegged as the “greatest high school girls mile race ever” in the national championships.

Jutting to the lead like she has done for all of her track career, Bowman outlasted Brie Felnagle and finished in 4:36.95, the third-fastest time for an American high school girl. Only Polly Plumer (4:35.24) and Kim Gallagher (4:36.94) have gone faster, and both were in 1982 and neither was in a high school-only race.

Later that summer, Bowman won the junior 1,500 (4:18.48) at the 2005 USA Junior outdoor meet, which qualified her to represent the United States at the Pan Am Junior Games.

On the track at Tennessee, Bowman is a six-time All-American, anchoring the Volunteers to a national title in the distance medley relay in 2008 and placing third in the 1,500 at the NCAA outdoor meet and third in the mile at the NCAA indoor meet this season. In cross country, she is a three time All-SEC performer (2005-07) and has twice garnered All-South Region honors (2006-07). She helped Tennessee win SEC and NCAA South regional cross country titles in 2005 and make NCAA appearances in 2005 and 2006.

Additionally, the human resource management major with a 3.85 GPA was named to the ESPN The Magazine Women’s Track & Field/Cross Country Academic All-America Second Team.

“I want to make the Olympics one day. But, that’s a ways off,” she said in a 2000 interview with the Fauquier Citizen.

Maybe that’s not too far away now.