Taking a fling at the Olympics

Jessica Cosby is used to snickers and raised eyebrows when someone asks what she does for a living.

"I tell them I'm a hammer thrower, and they're thinking 'hammer,' like nails into walls."

But Cosby, a 26-year-old UCLA grad, is an athlete, not part of a construction crew. And she'll be throwing her hammer in Beijing next month as part of the U.S. Olympic track and field team.

I heard about Cosby from her mom, who works at my neighborhood grocery store. Bev Cosby is understandably proud, as the mother of an Olympic athlete.

"Jessica works out four hours a day, five days a week," she told me. Her daughter has traveled all over the world to compete. She was a college All-American and held UCLA and Pac-10 records. And she set a national Olympic trials record in Eugene, Ore., this month, with a 232-foot throw on her first attempt.

"But throwers don't get any love," her mother said. "Unless you're a [track] star like Allyson Felix, no one knows you. There's no publicity."

And I wonder if it dents a mother's pride to have to keep explaining to people like me what the hammer throw is and why her daughter does it.

It's not a hammer and you don't throw it.

It's an 8.8-pound metal ball attached to a wire and handle. The thrower swings the contraption around over his or her head, gains velocity, then spins around and releases it.

"Imagine," Jessica Cosby explained in a phone interview last week, "a planet rotating around the sun."

But when I dropped in on the UCLA sports camp where Cosby was coaching high school athletes last week, the teens' throwing motions reminded me more of a kid trying to keep a hula hoop up, while swinging a broom around wildly.

It's apparently a difficult field event to master -- less brute strength than technique. It's an ancient sport, but new to the Olympic roster. The women's hammer throw competition debuted in 2000.

Why does she do it? Because it's more than a sport, it's an art to her. She likes the way it feels, "moving in a circle, but standing in a straight line at the same time." She likes that she gets better every

year.

And she does it because she's so good that she's scored a contract with a shoe company that allows her to travel, train and compete year-round.