Ronnie Baker looks like the old version of himself.
The 32-year-old ran 9.88 seconds in the 100-meter dash Friday at the 2026 USATF Outdoor Championships in New York, his fastest time since 2021 and good for a second-place finish behind Noah Lyles. It was the kind of performance that could put Baker back on the U.S. Olympic team for the first time since the Tokyo Games.
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Two years from now, the 2028 L.A. Olympics will be wrapping up. Baker hopes to be there and become one of the oldest medalists in Olympic history.
But while the stopwatch resembled the old Baker, the man crossing the finish line was anything but. After a disappointing fifth-place finish in the 100m at the 2020-21 Olympics sent him into a battle with depression, Baker said God has transformed both his perspective and his purpose.
“I’m in a place now where I just have so much joy,” he told reporters Friday following his race. “I look forward to getting here and competing because the joy of the Lord is my strength. He’s given me a gift in this track and field thing, and it’s not for me to be an Olympic champion or be the fastest ever or get a bunch of medals. It’s for me to enjoy the time that I have here and have joy in it. That joy draws me closer to Him, and that’s why I love this sport.”
Looking back, it’s easy to see how he had made his sport an idol, he said. The roots of that approach began to take shape when his parents divorced when he was young. Through the divorce, he lost connection with his earthly father and sought validation through success on the track and in other sports. He craved the praise that came when he experienced any sort of success.
Baker starred in track and basketball at Ballard High School in Louisville, Kentucky, before embarking on a collegiate track career at Texas Christian, where he won two indoor national championships in the 60-meter dash.
“Even after that, I always felt like I was searching for something,” he said in a video with This Is My Story. “I would win a lot of races. I would beat the top guys. But when it came to medals, I felt like I could never get a medal when it mattered.”
After his college career ended, he trained for six years to make a U.S. Olympic team. That finally happened when he qualified for the 2020 Tokyo Games, which took place a year later due to the COVID pandemic. By that point in his life, he had stopped partying and was going to church regularly.
“I was doing all these things and I was like, ‘God is going to bless me because of these things that I’m laying down,’” he said in the video.
Due to the pandemic, there were no fans in the stands at the Olympic events. Still, Baker recognized the weight of the moment while running the 100m final. He felt he was “in the race” for the first 60 meters, but then felt “the last 40 meters just kind of fade away,” and he placed fifth.
All those years of training came flooding back in his mind, and he was supremely disappointed, he said. That disappointment lingered and he eventually became depressed. He couldn’t stop ruminating on the result of the race.
“Everything had led me to that point, and when that all came crashing down, I realized I had nothing to stand on,” he said in the video. “I never really understood depression until it actually happened to me.
“I didn’t really want to do anything. The only thing I could think about was how I could fix what just happened, what went wrong, and it was just kind of this lethargic feeling of ‘I don’t have any feelings at all right now.’”
That experience became a turning point in his life. He had to recalibrate why he was pursuing track and field anymore and what his purpose was outside of the sport.
After the Tokyo Olympics, he read the Bible all the way through for the first time in his life. God began revealing Himself in a way Baker had never experienced before.
“In life I always believed that I had to work in order to be in right standing with God,” he said in the video. “I realized that it’s not based on the outcomes and what I can accomplish, but who I am in Christ. Knowing that God validated me, that He loves me, and I can serve others through the love that He’s given me through the sacrifice that He made for me on the cross — I really had to decide that I was going to repent and stop seeking God for the things that He could give me and seek Him for who He truly was.”
But for the next three years, he still wrestled with his competitiveness and the pride with which he had lived for so long as an athlete. He struggled with understanding how to glorify God while not getting caught up in the success or failures of his sport again. But as he had learned shortly before that season, walking with God doesn’t absolve him from adversity.
He was growing closer to God, but didn’t compete well during those three years. It had always been easy for him to run the 100m dash in nine seconds, but during that stretch he just simply couldn’t do it. He ran 9.98 at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials, but that was only good for 11th place, leaving him off the Olympic team.
“I was just wrestling with all of those things and God was really transforming me,” he said in the video. “That could’ve been a time where I quit and been like, ‘OK, I’m almost 30 years old, I had my shining moment at the Olympics.’ I just felt like there was something inside me that was like, ‘No, this is not the end of your story.’”
When we lose in sport remember that God is calling us “to His eternal glory”
That glory includes compete victory no matter what the scoreboard says. #defeatisoptional https://t.co/JuXXlAtFax
— Ronnie Baker (@ronnie_baker14) October 10, 2024
Next up were the 2025 World Championships — in Tokyo, the same place where he had suffered major disappointment just a few years before. This time he went with a much different perspective. And it was a much different vibe all around.
Baker was slotted as part of the men’s 4x100m relay team. This time, the stands were packed and his family and daughter were there. And this time, along with his teammates, he won gold.
“God’s like, ‘You felt like I wasn’t working, and I’m going to show you that I was,’” he said in the video. “There was no medal that was going to be better than the transformation that I had gone through in the last four years. For so long in my life, when I was going through these low moments — especially after the Olympics in 2021 — I felt like God was not there. I felt like He had abandoned me.
“The Bible says that God will never leave us nor forsake us. If you’ve ever felt like that, I want to encourage you and remind you that God’s been there the entire time. He’s been with you every step of the way. It may have not turned out how you believed it would, but He’s perfecting and growing you in those moments. That’s exactly what He did for me, and I know that He’ll do it for you. If you seek Him, I know He will show up for you.”
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