Sarah Groff, the top-ranked triathlete from Cooperstown, saw “my chance to make the Olympic team slipping away from me within the first mile” of the Hy-Vee Triathlon Trials in West Des Moines, Iowa, over the weekend of June 21-22. “My race mentally ended at that point.”
“What I didn’t realize until after the race, however,” she wrote on her blog, “is that I gave away my position as alternate in addition, a position that should have easily been mine ... Although I finished in ninth, a very respectable placing at a World Cup, I raced so far below my potential that I can’t help but be devastated by the result.
Sarah, a graduate of CCS and Middlebury College, was nudged aside by Sarah Haskins of St. Louis, Mo., who finished sixth overall to Groff’s ninth.
“As I look forward to 2012,” she wrote, “I have to remind myself of how far I have come and be excited by the improvements that I have yet to make. While I may not have been ready for Beijing, the lessons that I’ve learned through the 2008 Trials process will certainly pay off in the long-term.”

Labels: 062708, Front Page, Sports