Grant Holloway exclusive: On 'running free' at Budapest 2023 and using his Olympic silver as golden motivation for Paris 2024
USA's two-time reigning world champ in the men's 110m hurdles practices visualisation techniques for his races - and says he still has a "sour" taste from his Olympic runner-up finish.
Athletics
“You gotta be a little bit crazy to jump over these 42-inch barriers.”
Grant Holloway is very familiar with that "crazy". The 25-year-old USA athlete is a two-time (2019, 2022) world champion in the 110m hurdles – and is also the second-fastest man ever in the event, clocking a 12.81 in 2021.
But his Olympic moment at Tokyo 2020 also came with a “second” next to his name, the silver medal leaving him hungrier for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games and helping to drive his work away from the spotlight in one of athletics’ most high-octane events.
“I’ve been using that bad taste in my mouth just as motivation,” Holloway told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview. “Second place is, as they say, the first loser. But for me, I knew that race wasn't Grant Holloway. I just remember it. I try to move past it. I try to use it to mature. And I try to use it on and off the track to get better in life, because not everything is gonna go your way.”
Having clocked two of the fastest times in the preliminary rounds at the U.S. Championships in July, Holloway did not start in the final. He has a bye into the 2023 World Athletics Championships, which run from 19 to 27 August in Budapest, Hungary, as the reigning world champion in the event.
And that is what he is focused on: Budapest 2023, Paris 2024 and every hurdle he’ll face between now and then.
Grant Holloway: ‘I wanna be able to run free’
When he thinks back to that silver-medal performance behind Jamaica’s Hansle Parchment in Tokyo, Holloway turns back to his internal eye. The hurdler practises regular visualisation techniques for his races, an aspect he says is important in his event.
“I wanna be able to run just free, regardless of what happens...Of course there's gonna be some jitters, everybody has those when you care so much,” Holloway said. “But [I want] to go out there and run stress free and really see myself crossing the finish line before everybody else.
“That's my goal. That's what I set myself out to do. And it's up to me to challenge my team in order for us to fulfil that goal.”
Holloway is talking in particular about Budapest, where he arrives as the two-time and reigning world champion, and one of just three men to go under the 13-second mark in the race this season.
The Olympic medallist focuses on two aspects to keep pushing forward: Consistency and discipline.
“Those are the rules that I always live by,” Holloway said. “If I can continue to apply those two things to what I want to accomplish both on the track and off the track, then...the sky's the limit. I'm able to do anything.”
‘Sour’ Tokyo... golden Paris?
“Anything” is a scary thought for the rest of the global 110m hurdles field, which continues to chase London 2012 champion Aries Merritt’s world record time of 12.80.
“I still have that sour taste in my mouth from 2021,” Holloway admitted. “I had a lot of things thrown my way. But I am also going to remember what that felt like and I never want to have that feeling again.”
That second-place finish has made a detail-oriented Holloway an even more meticulous planner. Post-Budapest, he said, eyes will turn towards Paris and how his team is developing a plan to excel at the Games.
“I’ll sit down with my team and challenge them, like, ‘All right, this is what we did really good [last season] and this is what we did really bad. Let's see how we can be in the middle',” he said.
“I want to be able to reevaluate what I've done and then as I get ready to go into 2024 really hone in and grab the bull by the horns and do what we do best, but better.”
It isn’t necessarily about Olympic redemption, Holloway clarifies. Instead – and he harkens his nickname, “Wonder Boy” here – it's about letting his potential be showcased on the biggest stage in the world.
“'We wonder what Wonder Boy will do next',” laughed Holloway at a suggested headline. “My resume, my times, they speak for themselves. But Wonder Boy is going to continue to do wonders.”
Grant Holloway on ‘the perfect race’
The 110m hurdles require precision – and near-perfection – at lightning-fast speeds and with only razor-thin margins of error. Having come within 0.01 seconds of Merritt’s world record time two years ago, that mountain top still looms for Holloway, but so do other goals.
“This year? It’s the world title,” Holloway replied when asked which he wanted more – a record or a gold medal in Budapest. “If you ask me next year, of course, it's going to be Olympic gold. [But] the Olympics is an event where you have to be your best in order to get the gold medal.
“Next year, I'm going for gold.”
Holloway calls a sub-13 time in the 110m hurdles “the pinnacle of all hurdles", and likens it to a sub-10 second race in the 100m or sub-20 in the 200m.
“I would say it's probably one of the hardest sub races to do,” he said.
It requires a pristine start that volts up to top speed, but speed that a hurdler “must be able to control all the way down the track", Holloway explained.
He’s done it five times in his career, most recently at the Paris Diamond League stop in June, when he dedicated the race to his stepfather, Bunny, who had recently passed away.
“He’d been watching me grow into this young man... he really took me under his wing since 2009," Holloway said. “Some of the things he taught me I’ll be able to teach to my own kids. He took me under his wing and that race [in Paris] will be a core memory for the rest of my life.”
Having fun, building a legacy and... racing Rai Benjamin?
Holloway can be as quick with his wit as he is in a hurdles race: "I didn't come to the party to sit on the wall, I came to the party to dance,” he told NBC during this year’s U.S. nationals.
A nationally-recruited football player who nearly chose collegiate ball over track, for Holloway hard work comes with another aspect - fun.
“I realised that to have fun with this sport, you have to be loose, you have to enjoy what you do,” he said. “That's one of the parts of my legacy that I'm going to be able to leave. It's great to have fun with what you love to do.
"The times will speak for themselves, but you as a human being, [that] will speak more than the times.”
There’s been long-running banter on social media, too, between Holloway and fellow Olympic silver medallist Rai Benjamin, who competes in the 400m hurdles. The idea? The two face off in a new event: The 200m hurdles.
“For Rai and I, we're just trying to add some more enthusiasm to the sport,” Holloway explained, laughing. “It’s all love. [But] still to this day he wants to do the race, which is great because I would too. But, honestly, we have to do it on the off year. Hopefully we can get some sponsors in and get the track all built up and we can just go out there and have some fun.”