Background

Back in 1997, Melissa Morrison was asked how it felt to win a national title as a “nobody.” Without a hint of annoyance, the effervescent newcomer replied: “It’s not that I was a nobody. People just didn’t know who I was. I was always somebody.”

In 2000, the “somebody” won the bronze medal in Sydney and it looked as if the sky was the limit. Then injuries struck, first a torn hamstring in 2001, then Achilles woes. Things came back together in 2003, when she ran faster than she had in three years, and she set her sights on a return to Olympus to “get that feeling back” on the medal stand. She got it: overcoming another balky Achilles in the month leading up to the Olympic Trials, Morrison-Howard made her second Olympic team and went on to win her second medal, becoming the only American woman to win two Olympic medals in the hurdles. She and husband Josephus Howard, a former University of South Carolina sprinter, had their first child, Trenton Daniel, on Valentines Day, 2006.