Death by car in France can come at you from any direction. It doesn’t matter that there’s a little green man illuminated, beckoning you across the intersection, or that it’s a one-way street; as soon as you put one foot into the road, the other one had better be following it—and soon—because the squeal of tires is quick from the side you least expect. The French drive like assholes.

After spending an entire month traveling through the country for track meets, I found myself thinking about this, and what a friend said in January as she was training for the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team Trials. She said that the scary thing about an Olympic year is that it doesn’t matter about who’s been hanging around the previous three; athletes crawl out of the woodwork to contend for an Olympic spot, and you never know where they’re going to come from.

So was the case with Duane Solomon.