Francie Larrieu Smith
Francie Larrieu Smith was the youngest woman 1500-meter runner and the oldest woman in any track and field event the U.S. ever sent to the Olympics. Her running career spans five Olympics and multiple distances. Her best Olympic finish was fifth place in the 10,000-meter event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the first running of the event. She was the flag bearer for the U. S. Olympic Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. During her 30-year athletic career she established 36 United States records and 12 world bests in distances ranging from 1000 meters to 10,000 meters.
She first got into running because of her brother, Ron, who was a two-time national champion in cross-country and competed in the 10K at the 1964 Olympics. “My parents would take us to watch him run when he ran locally, and I saw girls running on the track, and I wanted to run.” she said, “(I) knew that there was something called the Olympics, and I could go run races and win. That was my goal from the get-go.”
She started with the Santa Clara Valley Girls Track Club, but it soon disbanded. The coach was the high school coach and at 13, she trained with the boys at Freemont High School. “I did run a few cross- country races with them. I wasn't allowed to run track meets. I wasn't allowed to wear a team uniform, but I did compete in a few cross-country races,” she explains but by her sophomore year the coach had moved on and she joined the San Jose Cinder Gals coached by Augie Argabright. “I wasn't the only Olympian that Auggie developed. He developed others, and he developed a lot of young women that went on to do things, other things in life. We were like playmates, sisters, and he made it fun for us. We could say we trained hard, and we played hard” she said.
In 1970 at the age of 17, Larrieu won her first national title in the 1500m after tying the American record the year before. Her winning times and titles gave her the opportunity to travel while still in high school. An opportunity that she would not have had otherwise as one of nine children in her family.
“I got to go to Europe between my junior and senior year in high school,” she said, “There were a few kids in my class that got to go to Europe in the summer. That was a huge deal for me to be able to experience Europe. And I was very grateful. The first team that I was on, there were some awesome women like Willye White, Martha Watson and Doris Brown. They were just great role models for me.”
The 1972 women’s Olympic trials were held separately from the men’s trials at Governor Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick, Maryland and without many of the resources of the men’s trials like photo-finish equipment. Larrieu made the first of her five teams winning the 1500m. Her experience was not what she expected.
“Well, it was different from what I expected. My first Olympics was 1972 in Munich, when the Israeli athletes were captured and killed,” she said. Her parents and coach could not afford to go but a good friend paid her own way, which made the trip less lonely. “The Israeli incident happened between my prelims and my semifinals. I made the semis, but I did not make the finals, and needless to say, I was very disappointed in myself.”
She would return, making the team in the 1500m for the Montreal Olympics in 1976 and making it to the semi-finals. Though there is some debate, she did make the 1980 Olympic team but did not participate as the United States led a boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the late 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“That was one of the lowest points, because it was when Mary Decker was wiping my name out of the record books. I’m listening to what people are saying– She's too old. She should retire. I knew I wasn't ready to retire, but it was hard to work my way through that,” she said for around that time she had made some big changes after meeting her now ex-husband in Texas and then changing coaches to Robert Vaughan. She believes it was better for her to have not competed that year.
At the 1984 trials, she was set to compete in both the 1500m and the 3K but after getting a stomach bug shortly before, she did not run the 1500m and instead solely competed in the 3K – the longest track event at the time for women, finishing fifth. “I did exactly what my coach told me not to do and went out too hard and paid for it in the end. And then, when I was coming down the home stretch, in fourth place, I felt sorry for myself, and I slowed up and let somebody else pass me,” she said.
In 1988, the women’s 10K was added to the Olympics. To Larrieu this was the perfect match for her skills; she had been running longer road races but was comfortable with the tactics on the track. She finished second at the Trials and made her fourth Olympic team. In Seoul, she finished fifth and was the top American.
Though she had originally planned to run the marathon in 1988 Olympic Trials, a minor injury pushed her to the 10k. In 1992 at the age of 39 and after finishing second in 1990 at the London Marathon, she made the switch placing third at the trials and making her fifth Olympic team. In what she considers one of the biggest honors of her life, she was the flagbearer at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona for the United States of America.
The Olympic marathon started out slow but halfway through, the pack was chasing the race leader “We were just all trying to play catch up. And it was an interesting course, too, because the last three miles were uphill.”
She ended up finishing twelfth, “I did the best that I could. I walked away, knowing that was going to be the end. I did play at running for the next two years, and then got a job,” she explained. She would go on to earn her Master’s degree in sports administration from the University of Texas and coach the men’s and women’s cross-country and track and field teams at Southwestern University for twenty years.
“Reflecting on the path that I chose, it was fun and worth my efforts, but also with every path you take there’s other paths that we can choose that would make our life different, and I guess one of the things that I would say to kids all the time. ‘You know, you're not always choosing between right and wrong.’ They're choosing between different. And when you take one path it takes you in a different direction. And that's what running did for me. It took me in a different direction” she said.
Note about the author: Cara Hawkins-Jedlicka is a longtime supporter of women’s running and is part of the leadership team for Starting Line 1928. She is currently an assistant scholarly professor at Washington State University in the Murrow College of Communication where she teaches personal branding and public relations courses.
