Ann Gaffigan
At the 2004 Olympic Trials, Ann Gaffigan won the 3,000-meter steeplechase and set an American record. But the women’s steeplechase wasn’t yet an Olympic event, so it was only an exhibition event at the trials, and Gaffigan’s win didn’t earn her a ticket to the Olympics.
2008 Olympic Trials. Photo by Eric Naslund
The steeplechase had just been added to the NCAA for women in 2001. That was Gaffigan’s first year running for the University of Nebraska, after strong performances in the two mile and mile in high school. Her coach told her the steeplechase was about to be added for women, and he thought she’d be good at it.
Gaffigan had seen the steeplechase on TV but didn’t know much about it, and she’d never been on a track that had the barriers or water pit. Still, her coach was encouraging her, so she figured she’d try it.
It was a learning process for Gaffigan, but also for her competitors, because all of them were just getting accustomed to the event, and not many women were running it. This made for a closer-knit group of competitors than usual. If there’s only one other person at the starting line next to you, Gaffigan explains, “it’s a little bit of a bonding experience, whereas if you’re on a starting line with 20 people, you don’t really talk to any of them.” Sometimes, this meant the steeplechasers from different teams would warm up and cool down together.
“It was also really exciting to be a part of something that was brand new,” Gaffigan says. But, looking back on it, she says, “I think I took for granted that it started for women just in time for me to be a freshman.” At the time, she felt like she didn’t miss out on anything—her gender hadn’t held her back.
2008 Olympic Trials. Photo by Eric Naslund
In the outdoor season, the steeple became Gaffigan’s focus. And in the spring of 2004, her senior year, she had a breakout season, winning at the Big 12 championship, setting PRs, and qualifying for the 2004 Olympic Trials.
At first, she didn’t expect to make the top three at the trials—she was ranked 12th out of 12. But she started to think she could do better, and when the day came, she did. She won, setting an American record in 9:39.35.
It was the best day of her life, Gaffigan says. She was proud of what she’d accomplished. But competing at the Olympics had been her childhood dream, and she didn’t get to go. Men had been competing in the steeplechase at the Olympics for more than a century, and she felt the inequity between what they could do and what she could do.
After the trials, Gaffigan and some of her fellow women steeplechasers worked together to get the event added to more meets, to give them somewhere to compete and to raise the event’s profile. Gaffigan also created steeplechics.com, a hub of information on the steeplechase for women and girls.
2008 Olympic Trials. Photo by Eric Naslund
A year later, she signed with New Balance, which helped offset the cost of competing. She also got invited to compete in Italy, and that was her introduction to both international travel and running professionally overseas.
“I spent the next few years trying to get back to that 9:39, and I never did,” Gaffigan says. “It was hard to train seriously and support myself.”
The women’s steeplechase was added to the 2008 Olympics. Gaffigan’s final race was the 2008 Olympic Trials. She made the final but placed tenth, putting her Olympic dreams out of reach. She retired after that.
Gaffigan had helped get the women’s steeplechase off the ground. She knew that, as the event matured, more and more women would break records. “We were in the infancy of the event, and in the infancy of people figuring out—of girls growing up and seeing us do it and deciding to try it, whereas we might have lost them to the 1,500 before,” Gaffigan says. “You look at runners like Emma Coburn and Courtney Frerichs, even before them, Jenny Simpson, and they chose to do it. And if the steeplechase hadn’t been something that they could see, they might not have chosen to be the first ones.”
Meanwhile, beyond track, Gaffigan had become frustrated with the limited coverage of women’s sports. So she and some like-minded women created a website called WomenTalkSports that aggregated content from different blogs.
Gaffigan channeled her drive to support women and girls in sports into a few other avenues as well, including serving on the USATF Athletes Advisory Committee from 2006 to 2019. Now, she is on the USA Bobsled/Skeleton Board of Directors and volunteers with the Women’s Intersport Network for Kansas City (WIN for KC), a nonprofit that empowers girls and women through sports, coaching at their camp.
For awhile, Gaffigan was kind of mad at running, she says. “We were mad at running because we gave so much to it, and it didn’t reciprocate,” she said of herself and a friend. “Sure, we had some great races, and that’s why we got to the level that we did. But there was also so much heartache.”
Gaffigan didn’t leave running entirely—she kept running to stay in shape, but she didn’t love it. That changed during the pandemic, when she started running more. She had written a training plan for high school athletes and decided to follow it herself. She felt faster, and running felt fun again.
In June, she ran her first ultra: a 50k trail run with her sister. “We did it relatively pain free, we talked the whole time—we loved it,” she says. “I think we got a bit of a bug, because we’re already talking about doing a 50-mile one.”
Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor in metro Detroit. Her writing about runners and other athletes has appeared in the Guardian, Women’s Running, Runner’s World, espnW, and other publications. She is a co-lead of the Running Industry Diversity Coalition‘s Media Subgroup.
