When Kenny Bednarek steps to the line on Saturday to kick off his Paris Olympics run with the 100-meter dash, the Wisconsin native believes he’ll be stepping up to it a changed man.
“I’m more of a professional now,” Bednarek, 25, tells PEOPLE ahead of the 2024 Summer Games, his second Olympics. “I mean, track and field is a professional sport, but a lot of people don’t know how to be true professionals. I think after Tokyo in 2021, I finally became a true professional. Everything I do on and off the track matters now, because when it comes to when you want to run your best time, it’s all split seconds.”
By no means was Bednarek’s run in the 2021 Summer Games a failure, but it’s left him wanting more over the past three years. Bednarek ran the 200 meter dash in 19.68 seconds — 0.10 seconds better than he finished at that year’s U.S. Trials. And when it was all said and done, the Indian Hills Community College native walked away with Olympic silver — a monumental feat for nearly any sprinter.
But Bednarek doesn’t want to be just any other sprinter. In recent years, he’s spent almost every waking second making sure he isn’t, switching his diet, his workout habits, and his lifestyle — all in preparation for the most crucial 20-or-so seconds of his life next week when he goes up against the best in the world, including fellow American sprinter Noah Lyles, another favorite to win gold.
“When it comes to executing, I’m more relaxed with my body now,” Bednarek says. “I know I’m capable of producing fast times, so there’s no reason to be anything else but myself. If I go out there and be myself and have fun, then I’m good to go.”
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That clarity and maturity was a hard lesson learned, he explains.
As a child, Bednarek and his twin brother Ian Bednarek were bounced from foster home to foster home, finally getting adopted by their mother Mary Bednarek when they were 4 years old.
“I had a lot of issues when I was young just because when I was being shipped from one foster home to another foster home, and as a kid you don’t know what’s going on,” Bednarek says. “Our relationship took some time to get some stability in it, but eventually we worked through it.”
Things improved when Mary moved Kenny and Ian from Tulsa, Okla., to their future home in Rice Lake, Wisc., closer to their foster mother’s family. It took years, but Bednarek finally came around as a teenager ready to graduate high school.
“Me and my mom’s relationship got better by the time I was about a senior,” Bednarek laughs, recalling his buzzer-beater behavioral turnaround just before college. “I was like, ‘OK, I need to flip a switch and get ready for the real world.’ “
His mom teases him now: “‘You were so much trouble from Day One, but the moment you started to behave yourself, you had to up and leave and go to college?!’ “
“And I’m like, ‘You know, I had to grow up at some point!’ “ Bednarek laughs.
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It was around that time when Bednarek realized his future was in running. A two-sport athlete who played football and ran track throughout all four years of high school, Bednarek loved “the camaraderie” of football but began to find peace on the track and bask in the sport’s self-sufficiency.
“That’s the thing I love about track and field: Everything you put into it, you’re going to get it back,” he says.
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Once he committed full-time to track, Bednarek started to see results come in waves. In May 2019 while still in college, Bednarek ran one of the fastest 200 meter times in the world during a meet in Hobbs, New Mexico, earning attention from sponsors like Nike and from the U.S. Olympic team. Less than two months later, he signed a deal with Nike and moved to Florida to begin training with former U.S. Olympians. He qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team in 2021 and won the 200-meter silver medal, running his personal best and coming second behind Canada’s Andre de Grasse.
The next year, he ran the 200 meter in 19.70 seconds and won the Diamond League 200 meter season championship, showing a flash of what could come this summer in Paris — something he sees as a very real possibility with the maturity he’s found and the sacrifices he’s made off the track to trim every possible tenth of a second in chase for gold.
“I’ve always been a hard worker, so trying to hit certain goals haven’t been difficult for me, but becoming a pro it’s just different,” Bednarek says. “And it just comes down to making those sacrifices. Do you want to stay up late? Or do you want to squeeze in a few extra winks of sleep and get ready for the workout tomorrow? If you’re being lazy and staying up late and not working on your diet, the results are not going to be where you want them to be. And that’s one thing I began to really learn over the past four or five years.”
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There isn’t much room for Bednarek to improve on the medal stand: only gold eludes him with just one Olympic Games under his belt. But whether he finds himself standing atop the podium next week, it’s hard to say Bednarek doesn’t already feel accomplished for how he’s changed himself – as an athlete and a person.
“My journey getting here has been a rollercoaster,” Bednarek says. “I made sure to work hard for my goals, and it shows that anything you put your mind to is attainable.”
To learn more about all the Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, visit TeamUSA.com and come to people.com to check out ongoing coverage before, during and after the games. Watch the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, beginning July 26, on NBC and Peacock.
