Jerry Racke was a vice principal at my high school here in Kentucky. It was quite remarkable, the whole school was abuzz with excitement because Jerry MADE THE US OLYMPIC TEAM!!! The sport he made it in was trapp shooting. Probabably one of the lesser know sports unless you are Barry Joye :-) of course. Well the thing about Jerry was that it was his THIRD try at making the team. Eight years earlier he was a top ten finisher in the US trials and was not selected. Four years earlier he finished fourth, named as an alternate but still one spot from making the team. So he tried one more time knowing that this would probably be his last chance. And so he did it, he finished third and make the team. He was going to the Olympics!

Jerry did not medal at the Olympic Games, which leads me to the question, How do you measure success? Jerry did not medal at the because he did not get to go the Games. The year was 1980, and while the USA was still excited from the USA hockey team's victory over the Soviet Union earlier that year in Lake Placid, NY; in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter ordered a boycott of the games. So Jerry had to stay home, never competing at the games, never fulfilling his dream.

Too often I think that motivational speakers and authors like to teach that you have to have complete control over your destiny, and it can be seized at a moments notice; you just have to decide to do it!!! Well, I think to a certain extent, that total belief in that axiom severely discounts many qualities that make us all human. All too often I have experienced people who made all the right choices, did all the right things, had the right attitude, yet still did not reach the goal they set out to accomplish; and find themselves in a position in life that the goal can never be accomplished. Does that make them a failure by any measure of success? Definitely NOT if when we search deep into our own humanity and understand that by the goals we set, a true measure of success is the level of character we develop in ourselves and the grace we extend to others in pursuit of those goals.

Jerry supported the boycott in 1980 and was not bitter. Disappointed...yes, but Jerry understood that there were more important things that the country needed to address than for him to reach his own goal. So from that experience, several decades of high school students came into and left Jerry's life, learning from the character that grew out of this one chapter in his life. An Olympic Success Indeed!!!