Michigan Daily: For Ziyah Holman, stunning comeback goes viral
Managing Sports Editor/Michigan Daily
By now, you’ve probably seen the clip. If you haven’t, Michigan freshman Ziyah Holman takes the baton for the final leg of the 4×400 relay at Saturday’s Simmons-Harvey Invitational from 25 meters behind her closest competitor. Within seconds, she passes an Ohio State runner. A lap later — mere steps from the finish line — she uses a final burst to bury Indiana too, winning the race for Michigan with a 51.79 second split.
“51 seconds of thrill” is how Anthony Belber, her high school coach at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C. describes it. On social media, hundreds of thousands feel the same way. As of Tuesday afternoon, the video has 454,000 views on Facebook, 204,000 on Twitter and 47,000 on Instagram.
What hasn’t made the social media rounds is Holman’s 600-meter race an hour and a half earlier. There’s less drama to that one because she won by four seconds with a time of 1:29.27, topping a pair of Ohio State seniors. “It was a stadium record, a meet record and an NCAA lead (for the season),” Holman said by phone Tuesday, with the nonchalance that accompanies expectation.
After all, she’s used to this.
