Well, not funny really. more strange, wild, bizarre.
I was reading the feature article on the site, Greg Hitchcock’s movie review which includes mentions of several running related movies. In the 8th paragraph he is talking about the Jericho Mile and concludes with “Life imitated art when Jonathan Gill, a just-released Oregon prisoner, realistically trained to make the Olympic Trials in 2004.”
This stopped me.
I googled Jonathan Gill and quickly found a related article.
I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a fairly well-to-do area. In the summer between my junior and senior years of high school I became friends with two guys from Ferndale, Michigan, a scrappier, little-bit rougher town that boarders Detroit.
These guys were very funny and crazy. Lots of fun to be with. They came over to my house a couple of times and we hungout with girls, jumping on my family’s trampoline and going out on the boat and stuff.
One of the guys was Larry Wine, who is now in LA and is an actor with occasional bit parts in sitcoms and a commercial here and there. The other guy was an All American runner. He had won the state cross country and 1500m championship as a junior – his name? you guessed it. It was Jon Gill.
The only thing I knew about him after high school was that he bounced around from college to college trying to pin down a track scholarship. The article below reveals the rest of the story.
article from Outside Magazine.
(incidently, “trampoline” is not in the spell check dictionary)
Interesting story. I, too, would like to know how it turned out. I pains me to read about people like Gill. He’s like an exposed nerve, and this world is far too harsh a place for people like him to live with any kind of inner peace.
I’m goin’ to prison," Gill remembers thinking as police drove him to the station. “I’m a runner and I . . . don’t like confined places.”
So he ran. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he bolted from the Eugene Police Department parking lot. He rounded a corner and put enough distance on pursuing officers that he couldn’t see them. Using the handcuffs for leverage, he tried to force open a locked door, not realizing that it led into the federal courthouse. The handle wouldn’t budge.
“I turned around,” he says, “and there were five guys with their guns drawn.”
Dick Brown can’t help but smile when he recalls what one of the officers told him later: “Ya know, that guy was really fast.”
I enjoyed that…that could have easily, and maybe should have been me. If I was only caught for the things I had done. Life itself is a prison…we all will escape someday. Some sooner than others.
So what haoppened. When he was cuffed was it a break attempt after his jail term? I couldnt find that many links for him so i would imagine he dropped off of the running scene?
He was funny and partied a lot. Allegedly stole credit cards from teammates. Half -assed training still got him in the low 25’s for 5 mi XC. He was a dreamer, just like in the article, he would play out scenarios when we were on the road or track like he was winnning some major race. I think he left for LA to try to be a standup comic or something.
ripin’ off The Gap without really having a weapon is one thing (and kind of funny), but stealing from team mates (if it’s true) would really reduce his stature in my eyes. That’s not a cry for help, that’s sleazy. (but you said “alleged” so I’m not gonna make any decisions at this point).