Meet Jordin Andrade | Olympic Athlete

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jordin Andrade and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jordin, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
I feel like comfort zones are stationary. Sometimes thats not a bad thing. However, when youre young and full of aspiration, it is the biggest thing to hold a person back for achieving something larger than expected. I use the phrase High risk/High reward because if it was ever Low risk/High reward, it’s probably a scam.
As an Olympic athlete, pay is small believe it or not. Coming out of college with a degree I had the oppertunity to become something bigger than myself and represent a country at the Olympic Games at the sacrifice of foregoing my expected career with my newly aquired degree. With continued effort and support of my friends and family, I was able to achieve the tag of a 2x Olympian! Although I did not make much money during my time as a professional track athlete, the Olympian label earned me a scholarship to one of the most prestigious Chiropractic University in the world and now I will be making more than I would have with my original degree with another honorable lable of a Doctor!

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I am a 2x Olympic 400 hurdler (Rio 2016 & Tokyo 2020). As you would assume, becoming an Olympian is not easy, especially in track and field. As a professional track and field athlete you have to overcome the clear obsticles of income, relationships, and work. Believe it or not, track is a popular global sport, just not so much in the USA. Meet coordinators around the world would contact my agent requseting my at their track meets. This lead me to visiting 35 different countries within the 4 year career I had. Now that might sound glamourous but traveling for work is different than lesiure. Most the time it is a solo trip to a place I dont know anyone and when I arrive I’m there for about 2-3 days with the track meet on my mind most of the time. This made it hard to start any type of relationship outside of my sport. If I wasnt traveling I was at home training and working the other 5 days of the week. That mentally started to take a toll on me as I was reaching 30 and just wanted to have someone to come home to and build a real relationship with. Luckily near the end of my career I found a great woman who was supportive and understood my dream to make it to Tokyo in 2020.
As a track athlete you get paid two ways; endorsements or winning races. Neither or which pay that well unless you are 1 or 2 in the world, so for the rest of us we had to get jobs. The average yearly salary I made from running track was about $10,000, some years were more or less. So I tried many jobs that allowed me to work while training including; substitute teaching, cable locating, real estate, IT, and throwing bags at the airport. In total I probably settled with around $20,000 a year but it was exhausting. Sometimes work interferred with track and sometimes track interferred with work so there was always a revolving door of trying to find a new job.
Lastly, the biggest obsticle is the actual work it takes to be a great athlete. As a high school athlete I was mediocore at best. Luckily for me at the end of high school I had an uncle (who was an Olympian himself) invite me to train with him in California for the summer. This lead me to a California community college (Mt. SAC) and inspired me to put in the maximum effort to become an Olympian like him. I studied the art of track as well as continued to improve in my strength and speed and earned a scholarship to Boise State where I finished as a NCAA silver medalist! This was one of those moments you always hear people say “You can do whatever you put your mind to”.
As a professional I dealt with a lot more injuries than I did in college and there is nothing more annoying than being hurt as an athlete. If you can imagine skipping a week in the gym regularly and trying to come back, its x10 as a pro. You feel slower, out of shape, and in the back of your mind you know your opponents are still out there getting better without you. In 2021 for the Tokyo Olympics I dealt with bilateral achellies tendonitis that I just couldnt seem to shake all year and it lead me to my worse season as a pro. That lead me to retire at the age of 29. However, it lead me to earning a scholarship to one of the most prestigous Chiropractic Universities in the world and in the next two weeks I’ll be earning my Doctorate in Chiropractic!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older that as a young man fighting my way to a dream it feels like I was on my own everyday trying to grind for the goal I set for myself. However, looking back there were so many people that were there to help me along the way including; my parents, my unlce, my coaches, my friends, my teammates, my extended family, the Olympic Committee, and the entire Cape Verdean community.

Website: jordinandrade.com

Instagram: @jhurdles

Facebook: facebook.com/jordinandradej

Image Credits
Paul Merca took the profile photo