Home Town Heroes
Hammering in the Morning
Justin Carvalho - hammer

Forget sipping coffee or reading the paper. Most mornings, you'll find Justin Carvahlo in a steel cage across from Hornet Stadium throwing the hammer. And throwing. And throwing.

Carvalho's hammer is nothing like you'd see in a workshop. Instead it's a 16-pound apparatus, made up of a steel ball attached to a triangular handle by a three-foot-long wire. Like discus throwers and shot-putters, hammer throwers build momentum to launch their throws by spinning several times before letting go of the handle.

Carvahlo, who set a Big Sky record for the hammer in 1997 as a member of the Sac State track team, will compete for a spot on the team that will represent the United States in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. For the last four years, the Sac State student and Ponderosa High School graduate has competed, practiced and coached on the Sac State campus.

In addition to training at least four hours a day for this summer's competition, Carvalho works as a volunteer coach for the "throwers" on the Hornet track team, studies kinesiology and works 25 hours a week at a sporting goods store. Beyond his Olympic aspirations, Carvalho plans to earn a master's degree in strength and conditioning, and pursue a coaching career, preferably at Sac State.

The volunteer coaching actually helps his training, Carvalho says, by reminding him of the basics. He also feels it benefits the student athletes to have a coach who has competed in the event.

"As a kinesiology major I can break down the movements of throwing," he says. "But as a hammer thrower, I can tell them 'When you get to this position in your motion, it will feel like this,'" he says.

And why did the former three-sport star - football, wrestling and track - turn his focus to the hammer? "I really feel that the hammer chose me," Carvalho says.

Carvalho competed in discus and shot put in junior high and high school but didn't even try the hammer until junior college. "When I first picked up the hammer, I hated it. It was hard," he says. But that hard work paid off in a track scholarship to Sac State, where he immediately broke the school record, twice. Pretty soon he had also shattered the Big Sky record and earned All-American honors.

Carvalho also competes in Olympic-style weightlifting and will join the Sac State Weightlifting Club at the U.S. Weightlifting Championships this spring. But his focus will be on the hammer.

Carvalho missed qualifying for the 1996 Olympic Trials in the hammer by just four feet. So when he learned his hometown had landed the 2000 Trials, he knew he couldn't pass up the opportunity for home field advantage.

"I thought, 'Now, I can put on the afterburners on my training,'" he says.

Carvalho is also looking for hometown support for his quest, seeking sponsorship money to allow him to cut back on his work hours and devote more time to his studies and training. He started his fund-raising campaign, "Team Carvalho," after seeing a news story about a filmmaker who financed a Sundance Film Festival project with small gifts from individuals and corporations and decided to try a similar "less is more" approach.

"I figure even if everyone gives just one dollar, it can really add up," he says. Justin's wife Barbara, also a Sac State student, teaches first grade while working toward her teaching credential.