“Who are you, Maggie?”
Maggie Malone Hardin began to answer the therapist’s question.
“I’m a D-1 athlete … I’m actually a Nike athlete and …”
“No,” the therapist interrupted. “Who are you?”
Malone Hardin shifted positions on the large gray couch, looking at the woman seated across from her, and tried again.
“I’m a javelin thrower,” the native Nebraskan says. “I threw for Texas A&M. I’m an Olympian.”
“No, girl, that’s what you do, not who you are.”
Malone Hardin sat back against the sofa in the calming, low-lit office in College Station, Texas. She realized she did not know the answer.
“My identity had always been in my success,” she tells the audience seated in the pews of the United Methodist Church in Geneva.
The All-American athlete, record breaker, former national record-holder and three-time Olympian had climbed to heights only a handful of the world’s athletes can scale, and plummeted to personal lows. She wrestled anxiety, depression and body image issues.
That day in the therapist’s office eight years ago was the start of a long, healing journey — a journey that brought her to this church in her hometown earlier this year. She has been sharing her story, struggles and all, across Nebraska over the past year in hopes that it can help others. Her message is one of gratitude and the faith that’s central to her life.
And she continues to train for a shot at Olympic glory. Malone Hardin has ranked as high as No. 3 in the world in the women’s javelin throw, but an Olympic medal eludes her.
A medal is still her goal, but it’s no longer her purpose, she said. She realized that as she began to answer the therapist’s question: “Who are you, Maggie?”
***
Malone Hardin strides up the Methodist church aisle in a dark blue blazer, crisp white shirt and light jeans. “I’m from here, you guys!” she says, pointing a finger down to let them know she means this exact place. “922 E Street. I love this place.”
She calls Nebraska and Geneva home, even after her achievements have taken her around the world. She points out people in the crowd who have known her since she was a little girl with big blond curls. Today the voluminous curls are pulled up in a long ponytail that swings and bounces with the same energy that propelled her to the top of her sport.
Her heart is here, where people believed in her first.
The white two-story house on E Street is where she and her sister, Audrey (Malone) Skinner, shared a bedroom.
People around Malone Hardin recognized her athletic gifts early on. Teacher, coach and close family friend, Joni Karcher, remembers how — as other babies were learning to sit and pull themselves up to stand — Maggie would rise in one fluid movement.
“She’d just kind of pop into a standing position. No holding onto anything. I remember that vividly,” Karcher recalled.
Malone Hardin notes she’s the product of two athletes-turned-coaches.
Her mom, Nancy Kindig-Malone, is a member of the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame, a state track and field champion multiple times and a National Junior Olympic competitor. Competing for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she won several Big Eight Conference titles in the heptathlon and pentathlon events.
Her dad, Danny Malone, a Texas native, played defensive tackle for Nebraska and was on the 1970 team that won the Cornhuskers’ first national championship.
Malone Hardin added her own titles, from school years that spun from volleyball to basketball to track to softball, with intermissions of show choir, band and speech. The 2012 graduate of Fillmore Central helped her school win a Class C state championship in track and won individual state titles in the long jump and triple jump.
“She always set very high expectations and worked as hard as it was possible to achieve them,” Karcher said.
And not only in sports. Denice Kovanda taught Malone Hardin in English and coached her in speech and drama. She knows her as the performer, slipping into a Chicago accent for poetry performances and drawing belly laughs as part of the Oral Interpretation of Drama group that won a state championship.
Like Karcher, she’s never lost touch with Malone Hardin. She bought a three-month streaming package just to catch a glimpse of her competing at the Olympics in Paris — a world away from Geneva and the high school gym where then-University of Nebraska combined events and pole vault coach Kris Grimes came to a volleyball practice and saw potential in the outside hitter pounding volleyballs to the floor.
***
“I wanted to play volleyball for the Huskers,” Malone Hardin says. “I was 5’7” so it didn’t really work out for me, but fortunately Coach Grimes came to my practice and said: ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with her, but I want her.’”
Grimes recruited her for the heptathlon, a seven-event contest that includes the javelin. As Malone Hardin trained, it was obvious she had an aptitude for it, he said.
Even as a rookie completely new to the sport, her throws would sometimes draw audible gasps from other coaches, Grimes recalled. “It was the moment we knew something really special was going to happen for her.”
Her first year, Malone Hardin placed third in the javelin at the Big Ten championships and 10th at the NCAA championships.
Grimes left the Huskers the next year for a position with Texas A&M. Malone Hardin followed a year later. By that time, her parents had accepted new coaching roles near College Station,Texas, and moved, along with her younger brother, Callahan. Grimes recruited Audrey to A&M for the heptathlon and she also transitioned to the javelin.
The family calls their shared journey “a God thing.”
In College Station, Malone Hardin was coached by Juan De La Garza, a decorated javelin thrower and Olympic coach known as “Chico.” Malone Hardin’s junior year was hard. She placed ninth at the NCAA meet where she was considered a front-runner.
“I remember sitting on the sidewalk, crying, thinking ‘Why am I doing this sport?’ Coach Chico put an arm around me and said, ‘Maggie, if you work hard this summer, you will be one of the greatest javelin throwers in the world.’ I looked at him like he was psychotic,” she says, drawing laughter from the crowd.
De La Garza did not doubt her. He saw a disciplined athlete who worked as hard as anyone. When she faced debilitating back pain shortly before an important meet, he “saw her keep working, pray and step on the field like a woman on a mission.”
“She’s just a special human being and a special athlete,” De La Garza said.
His prediction for Malone Hardin came true. In 2016, both sisters competed at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
As she realized she had qualified for the Rio Olympics, her sister sprinted toward her, already crying, and wrapped her in a hug. Then they were knocked over by a fellow team member who scrambled off the winners’ podium to hug-tackle them both.
Their parents were there.
Karcher was there.
All watching as Audrey placed third, and Malone Hardin became the American national and collegiate record holder, NCAA Division 1 champion and Olympic qualifier.
***
Her college years held hills and valleys, but they would pale next to Malone Hardin’s Olympic path. In Rio, excitement and doubt blended like a twist cone.
Even as she was running out of the tunnel into the Olympic Stadium, she had to remind herself she was really there, competing. “I’m just a kid from Nebraska,” she thought.
Rio ended in a disappointing 25th place finish in the qualifying round.
The thoughts that had been in her head since her youth got loud.
I’m not successful enough.
I’m not skinny enough, pretty enough.
Her disordered eating, fueled by body dysmorphia, ramped up. She might throw a meal up; might not eat for a day. She’d run extra miles at night, chasing the body image people were praising.
Nebraska Medicine clinical psychologist Meghan Fruth has heard similar narratives from female athletes she has counseled.
“Whether you are in middle school or in the Olympics, the pressure to look and feel a certain way all the time is heightened now,” Fruth said.
“We know disordered eating is higher for women; body issues are higher for women. Now (female athletes) have the additional pressure of having to post on social media and have people comment on what their body looks like.”
Fruth encourages athletes to be “a human first.” Athletes often feel they can’t have mental health concerns because they are supposed to be strong, she said. So strong becomes the front they put up, leaving no space to be themselves.
It’s something Malone Hardin became good at.
“On the outside, I’m an Olympian, a success. But on the inside, this is happening,” she says, gesturing toward a picture on her slide show. In it, she lies flat on the track after a disappointing throw.
After Rio, she started “self-destructing.”
“I did drugs, alcohol. You name it, I’ve probably done worse,” Malone Hardin said.
In 2017, her close friends in College Station pulled her out of the spiral and urged her to talk to a counselor. Then they drove her to one.
The sessions with the Christian therapist changed her path. Malone Hardin was no stranger to religion, growing up in a strong Catholic home. But her new look at faith, more Christian non-denominational, created a deeper connection, she said. “I felt loved and worthy and redeemed.”
About two years later, she started working with a nutritionist. It proved transformative. It took the scale out of the equation, helped her deal with an autoimmune issue, and upended the way she viewed food and her body. For the first time, she saw food as the fuel for energy, health and progress.
All of that work — the therapy, the recalibrated connection to food and her faith — helped her when she fell short of making the medal stand at the Olympics in 2021 and 2024, finishing 10th and 24th.
***
Malone Hardin married her husband Sam, a fellow javelin thrower who became her coach, in 2022 and the couple moved back to Nebraska.
They live on an acreage near Davey and commute to train and work in Lincoln.
Malone Hardin’s day starts at 5:30 a.m., training at the Bob Devaney Sports Center. She then goes to work as a partner relationship manager at the Arbor Day Foundation, followed by a second training session. Her day ends with a massage or physical therapy.
“The sport is pretty brutal on the body,” she said. “I’m feeling it at 31.”
She has always worked and trained. Only the top Olympians garner sponsorships that allow them to train full time, she said. She is grateful for her family and the companies and employers who have supported her in her dream.
It takes time and money to compete on the international circuit. In addition to smaller meets around the world, she travels to roughly five elite international meets each year.
As they look ahead to the 2028 Olympic trials, her training leans into her strengths while respecting her age and a shoulder recovering from an injury earlier this year, Sam said. They also make sure there’s more than training in her life.
“Maggie’s best performances come when she’s the most free, well-rounded and content person — not just a great athlete,” he said.
The couple were teammates at A&M. Sam also worked toward the Olympics at one time, but decided to coach and focus on her talents instead. “I believe God brought us together to achieve together.”
The past few years have broadened their view of what achieving looks like. Maybe sharing her message is what she is meant to achieve, Malone Hardin said, letting people know it’s OK to ask for help, to fail and try again.
“I hope (my audiences) don’t hear a message of regret or inwardness, but one of hope and of finding your own faith and purpose.”
“If I never get an Olympic medal, I’ll be OK. I’m willing to ‘suffer well’ if that’s God’s purpose for me.” She pauses with a rueful smile. “If that’s my story it will suck, but I’ve come to realize records fade and medals rust. They are nothing compared to eternity.”