A rereleased County video on Instagram about County Manager Eric Brown’s past as a top level UCLA sprinter was brought to our attention by local social media commenter Phil Tenneson, as it indicates Brown made the Olympics team in 1980 and also broke a world record, none of which we could confirm with extensive researching on the internet.
The rereleased Instagram video is a shorter version of what was first posted three years ago, and then trimmed a little and posted again two years ago on the Washoe County YouTube. All of the videos seem to have slightly delayed audio.
In these, Brown says “he had the benefit of representing our country back in 1980 as a member of the US Olympic team 4x100 meter relay,” which Tenneson rightly points out there was no representation since the United States boycotted those Games held in Moscow.
A History and Tradition of UCLA Men’s Track and Field document has him as among the world’s best in the 100 meters in 1979, and in the United States in 1979 and 1981, a year in which he clocked 10.37 to be a conference champion.
It has several pages about Bruins in the Olympics, including two for 1980 in Moscow with the asterisks **U.S. did not compete**. However, the two are Willie Banks for triple jump and Mike Tully for pole vault and the list does not include Eric Brown.
At what was still called the Olympic trials in June 1980, Brown did not make it to the 100 meters final, finishing fifth in a semifinal heat, after finishing third in a first round heat. The athletes competing in the trials already knew they wouldn’t be going to the Olympics as the boycott was announced in March.
The video then goes on with his narration, saying one of the first times he participated in a relay he said “we were running against the Russian national team,” in a “full stadium at Boston University.”
He said he was getting ready to run as the second leg, when a Russian athlete sabotaged his preparations and took the tape he had put down for his markings. It’s a curious choice of wording as well as at the time of his sprinting career Russians usually identified as Soviets when competing.
In the video, Brown says his determination led him to run one of the best relays of his life, and that his team “ended up actually breaking the world record that day for our age group in the 4x100 meter relay.”
On the internet, we were unable to find details of that meet or confirmation of that world record. The Washoe County Instagram post indicates he set “the world record while at UCLA.”
Addressing Tenneson’s concerns, Bethany Drysdale wrote back to an Our Town Reno query on Facebook indicating: “Yes, he qualified for the Olympic team and had the honor to be on the team, which eventually did not compete in the Olympics because the U.S. boycotted that year. That does not take away from the accomplishment, and I think this is a very shallow, irrelevant attempt to undermine someone's accomplishment with semantics.”
Drysdale did not address the stated world record, even though Tenneson has repeatedly asked about that too.