Stephanie Brown Trafton, née Stephanie Brown, (born December 1, 1979) is an American track and field athlete who won the discus throwing gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She is thus one of only three American women to have ever won the event.
She was a somewhat unusual athlete in that she had become a two-time Olympian before she had competed at a World Championships in Athletics. Her first World Championships in 2009 ended with a sub-par performance in the discus final, but in 2011, she placed sixth. In 2012, she secured her third trip to the Olympics, after a definitive performance at that year's American Olympic trials. Still, the best-performing American of 2012 finished off the medals podium in London in seventh place.
Brown Trafton has said she was inspired to become an Olympian as a 4-year-old watching Mary Lou Retton perform in the 1984 Summer Olympics. After a youth of attempting several different sports, she eventually divided her time between athletics and basketball. She competed in the discus and shot put at Arroyo Grande High School, and was the CIF California State Meet high school champion in shot put in 1996. After placing second in 1997, she recaptured the California shot put title in 1998. At the same meet, she added the California discus title to her resume. As of 2008, her 181.25-foot (55.25 m) throw to secure victory remains one of the 10 best American high school discus throws in history.
Nevertheless, she seemed to be headed towards a career in basketball, after being awarded a scholarship for both basketball and track and field to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her career was ended in that sport prematurely by a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Thereafter, she concentrated on track and field. She competed at the collegiate level in shot put and discus from 1999 to 2003, but missed 2000, while recovering from the knee injury.
Brown Trafton was named as an NCAA All-American six times in her college career, two times during the indoor season as a shot putter and four times in the outdoor season for discus and shot put. Her highest finishes at the NCAA Division I national championships were second in discus in 2003 and fourth in shot put in 2003.
Brown Trafton competed in the 2004 Olympic Trials in Sacramento, California in both the shot put and the discus throw. Her best throw coming into the discus competition was 192 feet. In the first throw of the discus final, she threw a 9-foot personal best of 201 feet 3 inches, surpassing the international A-standard mark, and qualified for her first Olympic team.
In August 2004, Brown Trafton competed at the Athens Games, and her best mark in the qualifying round failed to advance her to the finals. She placed 22nd with a throw of 192 feet even (58.54 m), under her 203 feet 1 inch (61.90 m) personal best at the time. She has expressed contentment with her performance there, saying, "2004 gave me an awesome experience. I came to the Olympics just out of college."
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Brown Trafton made what observers called "stunning improvement".
She began 2008 with a personal best that was unchanged from 2004. However, she improved that mark in March, April and May 2008. Coming into the Beijing Olympics, her personal best was 217 feet 1 inch (66.17 m), achieved at the Hartnell Throwers Meet in Salinas, California.
Until a June 21, 2008 mark of 218 feet 1 inch (66.47 m) by Romanian Nicoleta Grasu,
this throw stood as the longest on record anywhere in the world in 2008. Moreover, it was the third-best American throw of all time, behind efforts by Suzy Powell and Becky Breisch.
Prior to Beijing, she had placed third at the U.S. trials with a throw of 205 feet 5 inches (62.61 m).
Asked to explain her dramatic improvement, Brown Trafton pointed to a key difference in her training regimen. Unusually for her, she did not take time off between the 2007 and 2008 seasons. Instead, she spent what would have normally been the season hiatus working on the "supplemental training" of "balance, agility and flexibility" with Tony Mikia, a physical therapist/sports performance trainer at Sacramento-based Kime Human Performance Institute.
Although called by the mainstream American sports press "an unlikely savior of U.S. pride" and a "field filler more than a medal contender", a radically improved Brown Trafton actually came to Beijing with a reasonable possibility of winning. She had executed the second-best throw posted in the sport in 2008. And she had progressively upped her personal best by over 4 m across several meets during the 2008 season.
The first of her six throws displayed her progress to her competitors in Beijing. At 212 feet 5 inches (64.74 m), it bettered the field by almost two meters. She threw into the net on her second and third throws, then posted a 191 feet 7 inches (58.39) and a 201 feet 1 inch (61.30). By the sixth round, it was unnecessary for her to throw to win the gold medal, as the two remaining competitors had not bettered her initial mark. In the end, no one got within a meter of her first throw.
On a personal level, her victory in Beijing was the culmination of a number of months of steady improvement for the athlete, after years of steady progress but nonetheless inconsistent throws above the 60 m mark. It was also the United States' first track and field gold medal of the 2008 Olympics, after a few initial days of failure. Brown Trafton's gold medal in Beijing was more broadly notable for being the first American gold in the event for 76 years.
It was only the second American medal in women's discus at a fully attended Olympiad, along with Lillian Copeland's silver medal at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam.
It was the second American gold in the event, after Copeland's gold at the Depression-handicapped 1932 Summer Olympics. It was the fourth medal in American history, behind Leslie Deniz' silver won at the politically boycotted 1984 Summer Olympics. Additionally, it was the first American medal in the sport won outside the city of Los Angeles since Copeland's silver medal in Amsterdam.