LOS ANGELES : Runner Holds Olympic Moment High

Across-country star at Hamilton High School, Genevieve DeBose has had plenty of experience competing before a crowd.

But if she felt nervous in her last run, she can be forgiven. Her audience, after all, was the world.

DeBose, 16, helped carry the Olympic flame on its 5,000-mile path to Lillehammer, Norway. She ran a 500-meter leg Feb. 5 in Morgedal, a town southwest of Lillehammer.

“I started thinking, ‘What if I slip on the ice, what if I drop the torch?” she said. Los Angeles Unified School District athletic officials picked DeBose to take part in the torch relay after she won the girls’ City Section cross-country finals in November--the first Hamilton High runner ever to do so.

She was one of two Los Angeles students to run in the relay, both sponsored by Coca-Cola. The other was Humberto Sanchez of South Gate High.

DeBose, a senior at Hamilton, said that when she arrived in Norway, the subfreezing weather overwhelmed her. “My parents and I toured Oslo the first day, but we only stayed outside one hour. We were really cold,” she said.

On the morning of the event, DeBose, Sanchez and three other Americans picked for the relay ran five miles in the snow.

“I had on sweats and long johns, and usually when you run you get warmed up, and you have to take off your sweat shirt,” she said. “But not in Oslo.”

During the relay, DeBose said, she didn’t drop the torch because “I was too excited.”

But the run was difficult.

“The torch was nearly four feet high, and I’m 5-foot-3. I carried the torch in my right hand, but it weighed two pounds. After a while, it felt like my arm was going to fall off.”

Making friends from other countries, said DeBose, was one of the best parts of the trip. While speaking Spanish to a parent of one of the other relay runners, DeBose met a Norwegian girl who had grown up in Colombia. The pair became pen pals.

And while playing a piano in a hotel lounge, she befriended some of the Japanese torch runners.

“(They) came around and one of them said, ‘Beauty and the Beast?,’ ” DeBose said. “I said, ‘No, Aladdin.’ Then they asked if I would take a picture with them.”