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Decathlon Athlete – Dan O’Brien

Dan O’Brien, age 30, the first American since Bruce Jenner to win the Olympic decathlon gold medal (1996 in Atlanta), was adopted transracially when he was two years old.

Daniel Dion O’Brien was born on July 18, l966, in Portland, Oregon, to an African American birth father and a Finnish birth mother. He was adopted by Jim and Virginia O’Brien, a White couple from the rural town of Klamath Falls, Oregon, and grew up on a farm with seven brothers and sisters, five of them adopted across racial lines: Karen is Native American; Patricia is biracial; Tom is Latino; and Sarah and Laura are Korean. Dan’s talent at sports earned him a scholarship to the University of Idaho, but when he got to college he discovered that he liked partying more than the rest that school had to offer. Unprepared for the lack of structure of life on his own, as he moved into his twenties he remained a rowdy teen. He flunked out of school, got into a couple of minor brushes with the law, and received second -and third and fourth and fifth – chances from his parents and coaches – until he finally got back on track.

But by early 1992, Dan, then 25, was the reigning world champion in the decathlon, the grueling, two-day, 10-event test of speed, power, endurance and will that historically determines the world’s greatest athlete. He and his rival Dave Johnson became nationally known that year as the focus of Reebok’s entertaining twenty-five million dollar advertising campaign that asked “Who is the world’s greatest athlete…Dave or Dan?.. to be settled in Barcelona.” But with the world’s attention focused on him in the qualifying trials in New Orleans, Dan missed three times in the pole vault (“no-heighted,” in track talk), failing even to make the U.S. team.