Partners In Paris

On a hot August day two years ago, Mississippi State head track and field coach Chris Woods gave one of his athletes a simple instruction. It was a straightforward mission that would carry that athlete to broken records and an international career as a professional.

So what was the message?

"My job was to make sure I was able to touch Marco in his back at all times," Navasky Anderson said.

Marco was of course Marco Arop, who would go on to win the world championship in the 800m later that year. It was Marco who, in many ways, drew Anderson to Starkville, Mississippi, during the recruiting process. But to truly understand Anderson and Arop's success, you have to look a little further back in time because before there was Marco, there was Brandon.

Brandon McBride was the beginning of what has become a family tree of the 800m rooted in Starkville. The Windsor, Ontario, native arrived in Mississippi in 2013. By 2014, he was State's first semifinalist for The Bowerman in program history. In his Mississippi State career, McBride won two national championships, was a nine-time All-American and broke school records in both the 800m and 1500m. As a senior in 2016, he was named the USTFCCCA South Region Athlete of the Year before making his Olympic debut in Rio that summer.

It was McBride's success that captured Arop's attention. Arop first saw his elder countryman run at the 2016 Canadian Olympic Trials in Arop's hometown of Edmonton, Alberta.

"I'd sort of use him as motivation," Arop said before his own Olympic debut in 2021. "For the longest time, I'd be training at home. If I had a really hard practice session, my teammates would be like, 'Oh, what do you think Brandon McBride would do?' Just little things like that to get in my head. It would just motivate me."

Meanwhile, Arop was already on McBride's radar as the next Canadian great.

When Woods called Arop's high school coach, the younger Canadian was shocked that McBride's alma mater had recognized the same qualities in himself. Arop's interest was piqued. It helped that he knew he'd have a chance to train under Woods, the same man who had trained McBride on his way to setting the Canadian national record in their shared 800m event. It was a record that Arop would go on to shatter before his collegiate career was over.

Now would be a good moment to pause and reflect on Woods' own role in this lineage. After all, there was a time when the Mississippi State 800m record belonged to the head man himself. As a student-athlete for the Bulldogs, Woods was an All-American in the distance outdoors as a senior. He clocked a 1:49.10 indoors that year. Five Bulldog men have since run faster than that on the indoor track, and Woods coached all five.

So Woods knows a thing or two about getting the best out of his athletes. Anderson recognized it too. Just like Arop, Woods' reputation and the success of his previous athletes was all the reason he needed to come to Starkville.

"I knew nothing about Starkville, Mississippi," Anderson recalled of his recruiting journey. "When I realized those two guys were like two of the top guys in the world rankings, I was watching how they were able to dominate in the SEC, the NCAA. I was able to see how Coach Woods and the team at Mississippi State University were able to develop them and not just maintain them, and then I decided that I wanted to be a part of that program."

Anderson never questioned the simple instructions Woods gave him that day, and it was because of his singular focus that he was able to push himself harder than he ever had.

"I was able to keep up. I was starting to train with [Marco] every day because I was able to do everything that he was doing," Anderson said. "Coach would tell me, 'Don't look at your stopwatch. Don't look at or think about the time that you're running. You only have one job in practice. You only have one thing to do.' That's the only job coach gave me, so I wasn't thinking about how fast I was running in practice. I wasn't thinking about how much better I was getting. I was just thinking about, 'Okay, I need to lock in and stay on the rhythm, stay on the pace.'"

The seconds started shaving off. By the end of the year, Anderson had broken his own national record.

"By the time I opened my season, it was just massive PRs. I was just getting so much better, and everybody was wondering what I was doing down in Mississippi," Anderson said. "It was just training really hard and staying really focused. Since then, we've just been training together and keeping each other accountable and make sure we're on top of everything that we're doing."

The pair's training circle grew along the way. Lee Eppie, Anderson's roommate for the 2023-24 academic year, began to mix in with them. After winning a silver medal in the 400m at the African Championships this summer, Eppie was named to Botswana's Olympic Team as a member of the 4x400m relay.

"Our goal was to make sure that both of us go to Paris. The fact that we both made it means a lot to me," Eppie said. "Somebody that I was, you know, staying with, we always made sure we pushed each other in practice. He always made sure that I did things the right way. Even Marco, they always made sure that they told me, 'You have to do this. You have to do this so that you can get over there with us.'"

The three men will see each other in the stadium in Paris next week, but they'll also see at least one more familiar face. Woods will be there too, officially coaching Arop, but he'll have his eyes on Anderson and Eppie.

These are milestone moments for him too, and that fact is not lost on the men he's trained. When Arop won his world title in 2023, he brought Woods a gift to thank him for all those days spent in that Mississippi heat providing small but powerful tweaks for some of the world's greatest athletes. Arop hand-delivered a world championships gold to Woods.

"That was the first time World Athletics had ever done that. They gave two medals, one for the athlete and one for the coach," Arop said. "I knew it would just mean a lot for Coach Woods to have that. I would have probably given him my medal if it was just one, but I know he wouldn't let me do that, so I'm glad they gave us an extra one. That moment when I handed it to him it was an incredible feeling from my side, having a physical embodiment of all the training that we've done together."

And what would the possibility of another medal from this trio mean to any one of them? Arop summed it up nicely.

"I've had so much help along the way and being an athlete at Mississippi State has made me the athlete that I am today," he said. "I'm forever grateful for my experience, and it's always good to be able to show that wherever I go, I'm Mississippi State alum. The school produces champions, and it produces great athletes."

Mississippi State University Athletics

Players Mentioned

Navasky Anderson

Marco Arop

Lee Eppie

Chris Woods

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