Top 10 best high school athletes in Wisconsin history profile: Suzy Favor – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

This is the fourth in a series of stories on the top 10 best high school athletes in Wisconsin history as selected by the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. The athletes will be recognized at the Journal Sentinel High School Sports Awards show May 7 at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. 

Suzy Favor burst on the scene with state track and cross country titles as a freshman at Stevens Point Area High School and continued that success over the next three years to become one of the most dominant distance runners in Wisconsin high school history.

Favor won 11 WIAA state titles – seven in track and four in cross country. She won four consecutive titles in the 1,600-meter run from 1983-’86, as well as one in the 800, and two relay titles.

She still holds the three fastest times from when Wisconsin high school girls ran 3,200 meters in cross country. In 1993, the course was lengthened to 4,000 meters and then increased to 5,000 in 2014.

“The great thing that I love when I look back about high school was the pure innocence of the sport,” Favor (later Favor Hamilton) said. “It’s not about the corporate sponsorship. It’s about you and your friends out there, or the kids in the state that you know about. There was something innocent to it.”

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Favor also won three consecutive USA Junior national titles in the 1,500 beginning in 1984 and was a Pan American Junior gold medalist in 1984 and 1986.

Mike Olson has been coaching for 40 years at Stevens Point and was Favor’s coach.

“She had the talent, she had the desire, she had the competitiveness, she had the work ethic,” said Olson, who still is the girls cross country coach country and assistant track coach. “She was coachable and likable. Her competitors actually liked her. She commanded their respect through her effort, but also was not one of those that gloated over people or bad-mouthed them. She was always a gracious winner.

“She was the total package, as they say. She had talent. Desire and effort will bring you a long way, but if you don’t have the talent, it isn’t going to take you the final distance.”

At the University of Wisconsin, Favor won nine NCAA individual championships, and she later became a three-time Olympian.

Favor discovered early her love for running, although not without attempting almost every other sport.

“I tried them all. I ice skated, gymnastics, basketball, volleyball – I did everything, but I was awful at everything else,” she said. “I just loved to be in motion. It really didn’t matter if I couldn’t get the basketball in the hoop and I was the first one down the court and I had three chances and I still couldn’t make it in. It didn’t really matter because I loved the movement of all of it. But I did realize that once I was in ninth grade, I had to focus solely on my running.”

As a freshman in 1982, Favor avenged a pair of regular-season defeats to beat the defending champion and win her first state cross country title.

Favor’s freshman time of 10 minutes 54 seconds still is the second-fastest on the 3,200-meter course, bettered only by her time of 10:52 as a junior.

In 2010, Favor was inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame.

Later in life, Favor was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has become an advocate for mental health, a motivational speaker and life coach. She is the author of the book, “Fast Girl – A Life Spent Running From Madness.”

Favor said she realized her passion for running helped with issues that were not diagnosed until later.

“As a child, running became normal,” she said. “Just like exercise has become normal in my life now. It’s what I do every day. It doesn’t even cross my mind that I’m not going to go out and work out for an hour.

“I think I realized at a young age that this was something that just made me calm. I felt so together if I ran. I felt that day was comfort. If I didn’t run, it was something in me that was always kind of agitated. And, it’s kind of the same to this day. I realize how that gift of running was so much more than just going out to win and beat the kids.”