Cortland alum competes in Paris Olympics

08/01/2024 

Update: Melique Garcia ’15 competed at the Paris Olympics and finished fifth in his 100-meter heat, with a time of 10.76 seconds.

This time, the paperwork went through.

Three-time Cortland All-American Melique Garcia ’15, who qualified for the 2021 Honduran Olympic team but was unable to travel due to a passport problem, is currently in Paris, preparing to compete with some of the world’s fastest runners in Saturday’s qualifying 100-meter event.

The IT analyst, father and high school coach, now 32, will again run for Honduras, the country from which his father immigrated.

“It’s a surreal feeling,” Garcia said in a recent Spectrum News interview from Paris. “At the same time, I feel like I’m giving back to my family. My grandfather worked so very hard to get his family to America and provide them with better opportunity. So, to be able to put on this jersey and represent Honduras means a lot.”

Garcia’s journey began as a football and track standout in the Albany-area city of Watervliet, for the same school district where he now coaches modified football and track and field.

An anterior cruciate ligament injury during his senior year of football forced him to fully focus on competitive running. That spring, he became part of a state champion relay team.

Garcia attended Hudson Valley Community College and SUNY Cobleskill before transferring to Cortland, where he found teammates and a coaching staff that both pushed him to the best of his abilities and made him feel at home.

There, Garcia became a three-time All-American in indoor and outdoor track and won six SUNYAC titles at SUNY Cortland. He was also part of a Red Dragon 4 x 200-meter indoor relay team that set a school record.

An Achilles tendon injury forced Garcia to take some time off following graduation, but it wasn’t long before he began to notice that the times posted by top contenders in big, professional meets weren’t that far off from those against whom he was competing.

Garcia started training and switched his national affiliation to Honduras to represent his father, Lorenzo Justianiao Melvin Garcia. He set national Honduran records in the indoor 55 meters, the 200 meters and the 4 x 100-meter relay.

In 2019, Garcia qualified for and ran at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, one of the largest and most prestigious meets in the world, ranking 12th out of 30 runners in the preliminary round.

Garcia is the first SUNY Cortland student-athlete to compete in the Olympic Games in any sport since George Breen ’56, who medaled in swimming at the 1956 and 1960 games.

His rise has been inspirational to SUNY Cortland track and field and cross country head coach Steve Patrick ’97, who admires Garcia for his relentless positivity.

“We’ve had a lot of folks over the years make it to U.S. trials,” Patrick said. “Melique very well could’ve gone down that path but watching him now representing Honduras internationally and chasing those dreams, he’s somebody who’s easy to root for. It’s a feel-good story.

No matter what happens at the Olympics, Garcia has already accomplished something that very few athletes have: he is an Olympian.