at a local YMCA, a board member for a nursery school, and a member of two African Episcopal Methodist Church boards.
In 1977, he was a sergeant-at-arms at the door of the Georgia Senate. Bellamy escorted Prince Charles and introduced him to the legislature.
He died November 2, 2013. He was seventy-four.
Derek Drouin
Courtesy of Indiana University Athletics.
Derek Drouin
2012, 2016
Canada’s Humble Superstar
DEREK DROUIN IS AN ANONYMOUS, AND RELUCTANT, SUPERSTAR. YET CONsidering what he achieved and what he overcame, the Indiana University high jumper had one of most epic double comebacks in Olympic history.
In March 2011, he tore two ligaments in his right foot, an injury known as a Lisfranc fracture. Doctors conceded it was potentially career ending. A little more than sixteen months later, he won a bronze medal at the London Olympics.
In May 2016, an MRI scan revealed he had a double stress fracture in his back.
The Olympic Games were set for three months later in Rio de Janeiro.
“I was optimistic that if I did everything people told me to do, it was going to be fine,” Drouin said. “I was confident I could deal with the pain. I only needed to get to Rio, where I knew the adrenaline and the competition would mask any pain.”
In Rio, he applied pressure on his competition when he was first over the bar at 7 feet, 9¾ inches. No one else could clear it.
Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim won silver at 7–8¾ and Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko bronze at 7–7¾. When Bondarenko missed his only attempt at 7–9¾, the gold medal was Drouin’s. He missed once at what would have been an Olympic record of 7–10½, then ended proceedings. He draped himself in the Maple Leaf and posed for photographers.
“It feels pretty sweet,” Drouin said. “There have been some sacrifices, but I’ve always prided myself on my mental toughness.”
He became the Hoosiers’ first individual gold medalist in track and field since long jumper Greg Bell and decathlete Milt Campbell, both in 1956. Drouin and decathlete Milt Campbell are the only athletes out of IU to win track and field medals in two Olympics.
“The last couple of days I had a realization that I wasn’t nervous at all,” he said in Rio. “I was so excited to be out there because I was confident in my preparation, and also I just love the Olympics and was really just taking the whole moment in. I thrive in a situation where there is a lot going on. I don’t sense a whole lot of distractions.”
Drouin had been numbingly consistent in an event in which a miss can separate gold from no medal at all. After he won bronzes at the 2012 Olympics and 2013 World Championships, he won four successive major championships: the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the 2015 Pan American Games, the 2015 World Championships,and the 2016 Olympics.
Obviously, Drouin had a long résumé before he became an Olympic champion. Not that it made him a celebrity.
When he was surrounded by Canadian reporters in London, it was apparent they knew almost nothing about him. Life did not change after that. Nor did it after he won a historic three-way jump-off to win gold at the 2015 World Championships.
“The only time I think about it is when a reporter asks,” Drouin said. “I’ll basically go back to my regular routine as soon as I could after World Championships.”
Students at IU knew less than Canadian media. Drouin took a lifeguarding class in fall 2011 with Chad Canal, who remembered how hard it was to simulate saving someone as tall as six foot five who had “zero body fat.” Later that semester, Canal received a campus email and realized he had been partnered with an NCAA high jump champion.
“We had no idea he was a track superstar,” Canal said. “And he acted like a normal student. Nobody understood this guy being a big deal. Yes, he was tall and very lean, but that’s it.”
Canal, a dentist, later sent Drouin a message apologizing for not recognizing him.
Drouin’s response: “Haha. I’m quite content with not a lot of attention.”
He once sat at a table at York University in Toronto next to a sign asking, “Who am I?” Only one in ten could identify him, and he was already an Olympic medalist. That might have been welcomed by Drouin, but it sometimes rankled Jeff Huntoon, his coach since 2009.
“There’s not the level of respect that he deserves to have. It disappoints me greatly, actually,” Huntoon said.
Drouin’s technique was so good that colleagues told Huntoon that once the high jumper checks in for his event, the coach’s job is over. TV analyst Dwight Stones, a two-time Olympic bronze medalist in the high jump, called Drouin “maybe one of the best technicians in the event today.”
Drouin was born March 6, 1990, in Sarnia, Ontario, the largest city on Lake Huron (population 72,000). He grew up in nearby Corunna. He played hockey—don’t all Canadian boys?—and soccer, basketball, volleyball, and tennis. Because the landing area was viewed as dangerous, the high jump was not allowed in elementary school, and he did not begin that event until high school.
Nor did he confine himself to one event, training for the decathlon. His spurt in the high jump mirrored that of his height. He was five foot seven when he began high school and six inches taller a year later. In about eighteen months, his best jump increased from six foot one to six foot eleven.
His introduction to international competition was the 2007 World Youth Championships at Ostrava, Czech Republic, where he finished tenth, and 2008 Commonwealth Youth Games at Pune, India, where he won a bronze medal. His club coach, Joel Skinner, said the different sports were complementary. Once Drouin specialized in the high jump, improvement accelerated.
“Obviously, his basic athleticism helps him out a lot,” Skinner said.
Indiana would not have recruited Drouin if he did nothing but high jump. Huntoon said the fact Drouin wanted to do other events, and the Hoosiers wanted him to do so, influenced both sides. He eventually scored points at Big Ten meets in the hurdles and javelin.
As a freshman, he finished second in the 2009 Big Ten indoor meet but won every conference high jump title thereafter. He made a breakthrough that summer when he jumped a school record 7–5¼ in the Pan American Junior Championships at Port of Spain, Trinidad. When he swept NCAA indoor and outdoor titles in 2010 and repeated indoors in 2011 with a 7–7¾ jump, the 2012 Olympics seemed inevitable.
But in an outdoor meet at Starkville, Mississippi, he tore ligaments off his right (takeoff) foot. He looked up what the injury was on a website, and he despaired. His distress was eased by a call to his sister Jillian, who once finished third in the NCAA heptathlon for Syracuse University.
“She calmed me down. I knew that it was
