Three frames hang on the walls of Tonja Buford-Bailey’s office.

And each one tells a different story.

“That’s that picture right there,” said Buford-Bailey, pointing to the frame that holds the memories of her first Olympic Games in 1992 in Barcelona, Spain. “Do you see all those people in the stands?”

The photo shows Buford-Bailey, at 21, getting set on the blocks for the 400-meter hurdles. The background is filled with a sea of people and numerous camera flashes.

“There were 8,000 people in the stands, and I’m just like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here,’” the current Illinois women’s track and field head coach said. “For me, being a college kid, that was a lot. I had run the Pan American Games the year before, and the World University Games, but this was a little different.”

In a few of the photos inside the other two frames, also from the Olympics, Buford-Bailey looks like less of a stranger to the scene. She has a bronze medal wrapped around her neck, posing with two other Olympic medalists.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Buford-Bailey set foot inside an Olympic stadium.

She will be heading back in 2012.

In February, USA Track and Field announced that Buford-Bailey, 40, will serve as an assistant coach for Team USA’s women’s track and field squad at the London Games.

“I consider myself to be an Olympic veteran,” she said.

“Once you get to the Olympic level, that’s the highest level you can get in the sport,” she added.

In the world of track and field, making the U.S. Olympic team isn’t always predictable. Unlike many other countries, where a committee does selections, the U.S. team is determined exclusively on the track. The U.S. Trials are held right before the summer games. Athletes must first hit a qualifying standard time to go to the trials. Then, they must advance through each round and finish in the top three in the finals to make the team.

Through three Olympic experiences, Buford-Bailey knows how “cutthroat, do or die” the U.S. selection process is.

“You have to be prepared for the Olympic Trials more-so if you’re an athlete than you do in the Olympic Games,” Buford-Bailey said. “You got to get on the team first. That’s the first step. And then you can prepare for what you’re going to be doing in the games.

“That’s why I made three Olympic teams, because I know that this is the day that matters.”

But Buford-Bailey knows there was more to it than that.

h3. Stepping on the tracks

In elementary school, Buford-Bailey said she was one of those kids who could beat everybody on the playground in running, mainly the boys.

“That’s all we did on the playground, was race. We raced a lot. We had these lines on the concrete, and we just raced all the time,” said Buford-Bailey, who grew up in Trotwood, Ohio, about 10 miles west of Dayton.

One day, when she was in second grade, Buford-Bailey heard about a track club on the school’s morning announcements. Flyers were handed to the students. Buford-Bailey took one home and begged her mother to sign her up.

At the time, the cost was about $40, which was a lot for a single parent taking care of six children.

Though she can’t exactly remember how she convinced her mother, Buford-Bailey and her younger sister Tamika were signed up without hesitation. Buford-Bailey could only picture herself going to her mother with the flyer, pleading “Please, please sign me up.”

As the third oldest, Buford-Bailey calls her mother the “backbone of everything.”

“She was always making sure that if the bottom dropped out, at least I was going to be able to get back on the track and run because she knew that I loved it, and I was good at it.”

Her mother worked in food service, anywhere from nursing homes to mental institutions. The family grew up in a low-income neighborhood, surrounded by families who too were single parents with many kids. Though money was tight, Buford-Bailey said her mother would scrape whatever she could to pay for Buford-Bailey’s meet entry fees, spikes and track uniforms.

Everything seemed to revolve around Tonja in the Buford household. But that didn’t disconnect the family. Buford-Bailey said she is close to all her brothers and sisters.

With no extended family living nearby, and few willing to take care of six kids at once, Buford-Bailey and her siblings learned how to depend on themselves and each other. They learned to cook dinner for the family, clean the house while their mother was gone, help each other with homework and even do their own hair.

In the early morning before school, even in the cold winters, Buford-Bailey and her siblings went door-to-door, delivering newspapers to help supplement their mother’s income. They did that throughout their childhood.

At 8 years old, Buford-Bailey joined a track club called Northwest Track Club and stuck with it during high school. She was coached by Harold Martin, whose daughter LaVonna won the silver medal at the 1992 Olympic Games in the 100-meter hurdles.

“Times were very hard,” Martin said. “Because of a single parent home with all those kids in the house, she (Buford-Bailey) would come to my house a lot.”

“She was determined. We always stressed the importance of being a good athlete and education,” he added.

Martin had a weight room in his house, and Buford-Bailey would ride the school bus to Martin’s house to lift and train. Afterward, Martin would drive her home.

“I’ve watched her grow from a little girl to a mother and she’s always been very considerate,” he said. “Very friendly. Easy to get along with. She made friends very easily.”

Martin was key in Buford-Bailey’s recruitment to Illinois. He was very close with Winckler and told him Buford-Bailey, with her outgoing personality, would attract other athletes to Illinois.

When Winckler first watched Buford-Bailey, he noticed she had raw ability as well as a strong desire to learn and improve. The latter personality trait fit well into his philosophy that coaches should act as “educators first, coaches second.”

“If you’ve been around athletes a lot, you’ll find those who don’t give up that easily,” said Winckler, who is recognized as one of the top hurdles coaches in the world.

“Whether it was during training sessions or competitions in college, she always realized that she wasn’t going to win every race, but she was going to try and beat people the next time around that may have beaten her before … It’s a work ethic.”

Or, for Buford-Bailey, it’s a different outlook on life.

h3. ‘It could’ve been me’

Eleven months separates Buford-Bailey from her older sister Crystal. That number is engraved in Buford-Bailey’s head.

At 14 years old, Crystal became sick and developed muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease that weakens a person’s muscles. Today, at 41, she has nurses that help her out daily.

“It could’ve been me,” Buford-Bailey tells herself.

The one physical ability — muscle strength — that now doesn’t allow Crystal to walk has allowed Buford-Bailey to become a three-time Olympian.

“One of the reasons why I’ve able to have success is because I have strong muscles,” Buford-Bailey said. “When you grow up and see someone have trouble walking from one room to another, to using a walking chair, to being on a wheelchair, then to not being able to walk at all, it’s tough. It (would be) a tragedy for me to not take advantage of my muscles.”

Growing up, Buford-Bailey would help her sister on the school bus and walk with her from class to class every school day. Whenever Buford-Bailey would go to the tracks after school, she felt she had an obligation to take advantage of her talent.

“Everything that Tonja does, she dedicates it to her sister,” Martin said.

h3. Road to Barcelona

Buford-Bailey didn’t realize her potential as a hurdler until her junior year on the Illinois women’s track and field team in 1992. That year, she became the NCAA outdoor champion in the 400 hurdles and qualified for the Olympic Trials one month later. She didn’t think she’d go further than that.

“I was just going to go in and say, ‘Oh, I ran at the Olympic Trials,’” Buford-Bailey said. “So my whole family got there (New Orleans), and then I started to feel a little bit more anxiety about it.”

Winckler said he never discusses the Olympics with his athletes when they are young. But after seeing her become a national champion, Winckler felt Buford-Bailey could take her talents to the international level.

“I never brought up the idea of making an Olympic team when she was a junior in college, but at that point in time, I felt like she really made a breakthrough in terms of things she was doing to take care of herself on and off the track, that she really had the ability in the 400 hurdles to make a run for the Olympic team in 1992,” said Winckler, who has coached 13 Olympians.

“So many high school kids today say, ‘OK, I want to make the Olympic team in two years,’ and they really don’t have an idea of what that involves,” Winckler added. “We both came to the realization that for her to make it as an international-level athlete, probably the 400 hurdles would be her best. She started to focus on her event, and that’s when things began changing for her. And in that event, you can tell she has some really God-given abilities.”

But the idea of college athletes making an Olympic team sounded farfetched to Buford-Bailey.

In a brief conversation with Winckler during the Olympic Trials, she learned that LSU’s Schowonda Williams made the 1988 games in Seoul, South Korea. That fact was enough for Buford-Bailey to think, “Well, why can’t I?”

“I went into the race with a different mentality — to just go in and run my way through and see what happens,” Buford-Bailey said.

Before she knew it, she was in the finals, racing for a spot on the Olympic team. The odds were against her to finish in the top three.

Buford-Bailey was competing against three non-collegiate athletes with times nearly a second faster than her personal best. They were World Championship finalists. All Buford-Bailey had under her name was “NCAA Champion.”

“Realistically, anyone breaking up one of those three was going to be pretty difficult to do,” Buford-Bailey said.

Almost everyone in the stadium thought the same, including the officials. At the end of the race, the officials handed the presumed winners American flags to carry for a victory lap around the track.

Though Sandra Farmer Patrick — who went on to win silver at the Barcelona Olympics — clearly finished first, Buford-Bailey was sure she had placed second. But after the race, while her competitors were celebrating, Buford-Bailey went under the stadium, into a room where drug tests were taken and thought to herself, “Wow, this is weird. I really feel like I got second.”

Monitors throughout the stadium showed a photo-finish replay, and it was clear Buford-Bailey had gotten second. Her name even showed up in the results as No. 2 on the scoreboard.

Buford-Bailey came out from under the stadium, was handed her own American flag and got to run her own victory lap, by herself. She now laughs when she envisions the moment: “Of course, it wasn’t the same because the crowd was like, ‘Hi, hi, who are you?’ And I had a little small flag doing a victory lap.”

But the memory she will always cherish is having her entire family at once travel to watch her, especially Crystal. Buford-Bailey’s performance surprised her siblings. They knew she was good, but they didn’t know she was that good.

Buford-Bailey made it as far as the semifinals in Barcelona, but her Olympic debut was just the “gravy” on top of a breakthrough college season. If anything, the ’92 games prepared her for 1996.

h3. Accepting the bronze

By 1996, Buford-Bailey was at the peak of her training. Running low 53 seconds, she eased her way through the trials to make the U.S. team for the second time.

The race to the podium came down to the finals in Atlanta. The favorites were Buford-Bailey, American Kim Batten and Jamaican Deon Hemmings, along with two other Olympians.

Before the Olympics, Buford-Bailey and Batten had set and reset the 400 hurdles world record. Batten had defeated Buford-Bailey by one hundredth of a second in the previous year’s World Championships.

When the Olympics came, however, NBC already had set up an interview with Buford-Bailey, expecting her to win the gold.

But it was not meant to be. Hemmings became the first Jamaican woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Batten won silver and Buford-Bailey took bronze.

“When I first crossed the finish line, I was disappointed. But a couple of minutes later, we were under the stadium getting ready to go out to the awards stands, they handed us the medals, and that’s when I thought to myself, ‘Out of everybody that ran this race in the world, I’m getting a medal.’ “Once it was over, I was really fortunate because I could’ve been fourth, fifth. I could’ve gotten nothing.”

Buford-Bailey and Winckler never really talked about the results.

“I felt like it was something she worked really hard for and actually, we both felt going into the race, she had a very good chance to win the gold,” Winckler said. “The 400 hurdles was probably one of the toughest events in women’s track and field that year. Very competitive. You had a record-holder (Batten) in that event.”

As for those interviews, NBC canceled on Buford-Bailey. Before the 400 hurdles finals, her name was all over the newspapers, predicting her as the winner. The next morning, she was barely mentioned.

“I already know the game, but at that point, there was no way I was going to get my feelings hurt,” Buford-Bailey said. “The media didn’t care. My friends and family cared. So I thought, ‘OK, this is how it works.’”

She keeps her medal in a safe at home.

h3. A break from track

Buford-Bailey continued to compete after the ‘96 Olympics, but the following years just weren’t the same. Ranking sixth in the world sounded nice, but it was obvious her name was falling down the list.

For 20 straight years, Buford-Bailey had never taken time off the track. She ran through an Achilles injury at the 1996 Games, and it continued to get worse, but that wasn’t the roadblock for her.

In September 1998, she gave birth to her son, Victor Jr. “VJ” — named after his father Victor Bailey. At 28, the new mom didn’t do any training during her pregnancy.

For six months, she could not keep food down, vomiting frequently with nausea. She was even hospitalized for dehydration at one point.

“I couldn’t even drive down the street because I would have to get out and throw up,” Buford-Bailey said.

After the birth of her son, she “started eating Chick-Fil-A all over (again),” but lost her passion for track.

“I was like, ‘Hmmm, this sitting on the couch, watching TV thing feels kinda nice. I could do this for a while.’ Yeah, that was about it. I just sat around, watched TV, ate.”

But she was still following the sport, watching the times athletes would clock at international events. She said she got an “itch” to go for one more Olympics. When December 1999 rolled around, she started training for the Olympic Trials, which was only six months away.

The old Tonja didn’t come back so quickly. At the 1999 U.S. Outdoors, she ran about four seconds off the trial’s standard, set around 54 seconds. She competed at meets throughout the nation, looking for improvements, but saw results as slow as a minute.

At the time, Buford-Bailey lived in Dallas training by herself, as Winckler was still coaching at Illinois. Buford-Bailey was basically her own coach, setting up her own hurdles and timing herself with no one to evaluate her form.

Buford-Bailey competed at a meet hosted by Illinois and, again, ran close to a minute. At that point, she felt like she needed to quit. She was looking for someone to tell her she was wasting her time, that an Olympic run with only a few months of training was stupid. But at that meet, the only people with her were her mother, son and younger sister. And Buford-Bailey’s mother didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear.

“Just the fact that she (my mother) was that adamant, like ‘You got this Tonja. It’s not time for you to quit,’” Buford-Bailey said. “And I always respected my mother’s opinion. She would never tell me anything that she felt was wrong.”

h3. The tipping point

After another meet in Texas, Buford-Bailey clocked 57 seconds and went home complaining to her husband. She describes him as “no nonsense,” who, as a former NFL player also played at the highest level in his sport. He didn’t tell her she needed to quit, nor did he drill the “you got this” mantra into her head. Instead, he told her: “Well, make a decision. You gon’ quit, or you gon’ do it? And if you gon’ do it, do it right, do it well, do it hard, do it aggressively.”

That was when Buford-Bailey started to focus.

She had one more chance to qualify for the trials, at a meet in North Carolina. At the meet, a friend and former hurdler approached Buford-Bailey and Batten, who also was struggling, and told them the other, younger athletes at the meet had said, “We don’t have to worry about them (Buford-Bailey and Batten). They’re washed up.”

That made all the difference for Buford-Bailey at that moment.

“I was like, ‘I cannot believe these young girls, who are running three seconds slower than my personal best, are walking around talking junk. That’s one thing I don’t like.”

Asked if she felt hurt, Buford-Bailey responded, “I was pissed. My feelings were not hurt, I was like a tiger.”

She thought to herself, “I’ll show them. I’m about to mess this whole Olympic dream up for everybody cause I’m making this Olympic team.”

Indeed, she did. In North Carolina, she jumped from 59 to low-55 seconds, made the trials, ran hard at every race in the trials and made the U.S. team.

In the midst of having a son and becoming both a mother and a wife, Buford-Bailey realized the missing piece.

“When your whole life is surrounded by track, and then you become a mother, you become a wife, your other priorities become a little lower on your list, and it’s hard to motivate yourself,” Buford-Bailey said. “And that’s what I needed. I needed motivation — just young girls talking junk.”

At the Sydney Games, Buford-Bailey admitted she didn’t have a goal, joking, “To make it around the track?”

“Sad to say,” added Buford-Bailey. She finished fourth in the first-round heat, ending her Olympic athletic career. She said it was the best of all her Olympic experiences because of the city. Her husband, mother and son were with her. They celebrated her son’s second birthday there.

h3. A mother and a coach

VJ is now 12 years old. Her daughter, Victoria, is eight. Sometimes after school, they’ll get dropped off at their mother’s practices, horsing around with the track and field assistant coaches or playing with the athletes.

Buford-Bailey’s role as a mother doesn’t just stop at her children.

“She’s a coach and a parent; she’s a mom to me,” said Illinois junior Andrew Riley, whom Buford-Bailey has coached for two seasons.

Riley won the 2011 indoor national title in the 60-meter hurdles and hails from Kingston, Jamaica.

“Being away from home, you have to have a second mom to encourage you,” he said. “When you feel that schoolwork or track is kind of giving you a problem, she’s there to encourage you, motivate you.”

In 2007, Buford-Bailey was an assistant coach for the U.S. Team at the Pan American Junior Athletics Championships and was the women’s sprints/hurdles coach at the IAAF World Outdoor Championships in Berlin in 2009.

The U.S. Track and Field Committee coaching selection for the Olympics is heavily based on reviews, relationships and trust from athletes and staff members who have coached at the international level.

Miami track and field head coach Amy Deem will serve as the head coach of the U.S. track and field Olympic team. Deem said she’s known Buford-Bailey since they were college athletes and considers Buford-Bailey one of her closest friends in the sport.

“If you look at someone like Tonja, she’s not only doing a good job as a coach at the University of Illinois, but she also has Olympic Games experience,” said Deem, who also worked alongside Buford-Bailey at the IAAF World Outdoor Championships.

“She brings not only the coaching aspect to the staff, but she’s been there, done that.”