Last month, Chase Ealey, the 29-year-old daughter of a Riverton truck driver, won the world shot putting championship in Budapest, Hungary, and earlier this month set the U.S. record in Oregon.
The win in Budapest marked the second year in a row that the Springfield native snagged the world championship – the only times an American has captured the top honor.
Chase Ealey is the daughter of Chuck Ealey of Riverton and Michelle Martinez of Los Alamos, New Mexico. She currently lives in England, where she is training for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
"She's the favorite for the Olympics in Paris, but she was also in 2020 in Tokyo," her mother said.
"In 2020, she didn't do good," her father said. "And then she got COVID. She got sick and she was really doing bad. So, she hooked up with a friend and ended up going to England. She parted ways with her coach and (then she) got with that coach in England, and she has just skyrocketed since then."
The 5-foot 10-inch, 207-pound athlete can hurl an 8.82 pound shot more than 68 feet.
"She's more of a girly girl throwing shots," Martinez said of her daughter. "She just wants to further the sport and show girls that you can be strong and you can be feminine. I tease her by calling her a 'girly girl' because I'm a tomboy. My hair is in ponytails. I wear cowboy boots. I live on a ranch and kind of smell like my horses. Chase, she likes to do her hair, her makeup, her nails. She likes to dress up and she likes to look pretty, but she can get down and dig a hole with me, too."
Chase's father put it this way: "She's big and burly – I hate to say it – but she still wants to be prissy, too."
Chase's parents met while Chuck Ealey was stationed in the U.S. Army at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. After being discharged, they moved to Sangamon County, where Chase was born. She lived in Riverton until she was 3 years old, when her parents divorced. She then moved with her mother to Los Alamos, which is where the first atomic bomb was developed.
"People said our girls' track team was so good because they were 'atomic-powered,'" Martinez recalled. "Chase spent her summers and holidays in Riverton after the divorce," she added.
In high school, Chase was a standout athlete.
"She was a thrower and a runner," Ealey said of his daughter. "She's won the New Mexico shot-put championship and the 100-meter-dash championship in the same year."
She later competed for the Oklahoma State University Cowgirls, where she earned a degree in psychology.
"We just bawled when she won the world championship the first time. I couldn't believe it, because she wasn't throwing good. She just never seemed to throw good at the right times," Ealey said. "She kind of was hurt and wasn't throwing good. And then she got the world championships and threw decent."
While Chase is the reigning world champion, the world record in the women's shot put was set in 1987 by Soviet athlete Natalya Venediktovna Lisovskaya who threw 74 feet, 3 inches. It was an era when allegations of performance-enhancing drugs plagued eastern European female athletes. But accusations against Lisovskaya were never substantiated.
In January, Chase is slated to wed British strongman Mitch Jackson.
Scott Reeder, a staff writer for Illinois Times, can be reached at [email protected].
