Suzy Favor Hamilton

The Stevens Point story begins on the Plover River, where she gathered branches for forts and galloped for hours pretending she was a horse.

Born in Stevens Point on August 8, 1968, to Conrad and Rachel Favor, she ran her first real race—a fifth-grade 400—under her father’s coaching, passing the girls and then the boys. At Stevens Point Area Senior High, class of 1986, she won eleven WIAA titles, including four in cross country and four straight 1,600s. Scholastic ranked her among the century’s top hundred high-school athletes. At the University of Wisconsin she collected nine NCAA titles and the Honda Cup. Personal bests included 3:57.40 in the 1,500 (2000) and 4:22.93 in the mile (1998).

She competed in Barcelona, Atlanta, and Sydney. In the 2000 Olympic 1,500 final she led into the last lap and fell; she later said she had tripped herself rather than finish off the podium, running in the shadow of her brother Dan’s suicide the year before. Later struggles—including a bipolar misdiagnosis and a public Las Vegas escort scandal that cost her sponsors—closed the competitive chapter. In 2010 she became the first Wisconsin female athlete inducted into the National High School Hall of Fame. The Point memory remains the river and the freshman who already owned the state meet.