Quanesha Burks ordered a medium order of no-salt fries and sweet and sour sauce at McDonald's — something she doesn't normally do, but she decided to treat herself the day after making her first Olympic team.
“I just ate it with gratitude,” Burks said.
Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports
Before Burks became a professional long jumper, her only work experience was working at a McDonald's at age 17 in Hartsell, Alabama, a town of 14,000 where she and her siblings were raised by her grandparents. She remembers struggling through her childhood watching her family earn a living before payday. Her day would start at 4:30 a.m. by taking her grandmother to her job at a local nursing home, 30 minutes from her home. Once home, she would wake her sisters up and get them ready for school, then drop them off to attend her own classes. After school, it was practice, then work.
“When I worked at McDonald's, I thought it was the best job,” Burks said. “I was making $100 every two weeks. It was a terrible job, but I was happy to come to work every day and I knew it was part of my goal of going to college.”
While attending Hartsell High School, Burks quickly noticed her classmates using sports as a way to earn college scholarships. A family friend bought her shoes to play basketball; she dreamed of playing for Pat Summit in Tennessee. As track and field season approached, another friend encouraged her to try out and bought her cleats to compete in sprints and jumping events. When she placed third at the 2012 U.S. Junior Olympics, she decided to continue playing sports to attend college.
“I remember researching what it would take to get a full scholarship and writing down my goals,” Burks said, “and then I took a 20-foot jump and everything changed.”
Practice ended before she had to go to McDonald's at 4 p.m., and high school students were allowed to work until 10 p.m. She worked early morning shifts on weekends. All her earnings went to paying her grandmother's car insurance.
Burks' determination to support her family nearly cost her the scholarship she wanted. Later, when Mississippi State coach Steve Dudley couldn't find Burks at home during a recruiting visit, he went to a McDonald's and waited for her to take a break before talking. Alabama coach Miguel Pate called Burks multiple times while she was working the drive-thru, and she promised to keep her recruiting calls short and to call coaches whenever she had free time.
“Coach Pate actually sat me down with my high school coach, Kenny Lopez, and my guidance counselor and helped me understand how my life was going to change and how I was going to not have to work at McDonald's,” Burks said.
Burks didn't quit her job until she'd won 11 state titles by the time she graduated from high school, including sweeps in the 100 meters, long jump and triple jump. At Alabama, she was the first in her family to attend college and built a successful career in which she set school records, earned All-American honors and won the 2015 NCAA outdoor and 2016 NCAA indoor long jump titles. (The awards section of her biography on RollTide.com lists 27 bullet points.) Her next full-time job will be to be a professional jumper.
But the last few years as a professional haven't been easy for Burks. In 2018, she finished fourth at the World Indoor Championships, missing the podium by just 0.04 meters (1.5 inches). A year later, she lost her grandfather, “the only father I've ever had in my life,” one week before the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships. He was buried on July 25, 2019, and she boarded a flight to Des Moines and competed two days later, but failed to record a successful jump and missed the 2019 World Championships.
Burks bounced back by winning the U.S. Indoor Championships on Feb. 15, 2020, but the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, were canceled, and then the entire outdoor event was canceled soon after because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many professional track and field athletes, Burks continued training until she broke her femur in February of this year, sidelining her for 11 weeks without being able to run or jump.
As her rivals hit Olympic standards and earned points in the World Athletics ranking system, Burks watched idly and verbally announced on TikTok that she would make the Olympic team.
“It felt like all the odds were stacked against me,” Burks says. “At one point, my coach told me, 'I don't know if I'll be able to physically attend the Trials. The doctors didn't know if I'd make it in time. I saw several specialists, but they had very little hope for me. I was facing a lot, but I kept remembering when I worked at McDonald's. I had a goal in mind, and I knew I could do it.'
Though the bone bruise in her takeoff leg was still serious, Burks was on an upswing, having jumped a season's best of 6.85 meters just three weeks earlier in Chula Vista, California. Burks qualified for the preliminaries with a personal best of 6.93 meters, but hadn't jumped that high since 2015. She came into the competition with the Olympic standard in hand, but only secured it at her final meet before the preliminaries. Prior to that jump, she was ranked 11th in the U.S. in '21.
The long jump preliminary rounds went smoothly, with Burks qualifying for the final with her first jump. She entered the final with the second-best jump of the field, but the favorites got in early and jumped over 6.90 meters twice in the first round. Burks was solid through four rounds, but had a lackluster series, with no podium-caliber times. She finally found her groove in the fifth round, moving from sixth to third place with a lifetime best of 6.96 meters. She held on to her spot and earned a spot on her first Olympic team.
Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports
With her victory at the U.S. Olympic Trials, Brittney Reese won her 13th title for the United States and will be heading into her fourth Olympics looking to add another medal to her collection after winning gold in London in 2012 and silver in Rio in 2016. NCAA champion Tara Davis took second place and continues to emerge as the next big star in U.S. jumping with a rapidly growing social media following, including 166,700 followers on TikTok, 209,000 followers on Instagram and 265,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel she shares with her boyfriend, Paralympian Hunter Woodhall.
While Reese and Davis have both enjoyed success at the highest levels of the sport for many years, Davis believes his career path may resonate somewhat with those who continue to take the sport seriously after college.
“Britney gets all the praise,” Burks says, “Tara gets all the support. She's an icon, she's an entertainer. I didn't have it all laid out. I wasn't in everyone's sights. I still feel overlooked, but it's OK. I know it all starts with inner confidence. I owe it all to my mindset and determination to where I am.”
“It's been a long journey. It all started as a little girl working at McDonald's and now here I am.”
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