VCU news

By Sian Wilkerson

At the start of every year, Virginia Commonwealth University track and field star Guðrún Hallgrímsdóttir writes out her goals on sticky notes and adheres them to the wall above her bed. They serve as a visual reminder of what the aspiring Olympian would like to accomplish.

Then, one by one, she starts to check them off the list. Take last year, for example.

In 2024, Hallgrímsdóttir set personal throwing bests in both the indoor and outdoor track and field seasons. She established a VCU record in the hammer throw. She finished top-five in both NCAA championship competitions. She was the Atlantic 10 indoor weight throw and hammer throw champion. And she earned first team All-America honors.

“It feels unreal,” Hallgrímsdóttir said. “I love looking back at my journey here because I feel like I’ve come very far in the last three or four years.”

She came very far geographically, too. When the fourth-year biology major arrived in Richmond from her native Iceland, she was the first international athlete to work with VCU throwing coach Ethan Tussing. And right away, he said, Hallgrímsdóttir made an impression.

Recalling an early conversation in which Tussing told her they were going to overhaul her process, ”she just committed to that change and had a really great mindset,” he said. “And then she’d say, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ and then she just routinely did everything she said she would do, no matter how far-fetched it might have seemed at times.”

Iceland’s population is only about 400,000 – about the same as Chesterfield County’s – and Hallgrímsdóttir grew up in a small town in the Northern European country. She spent years competing as a big fish in a very small pond, with “basically no one” to compete against at times, she said – and sometimes contending alongside men.

When she joined a sporting club in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, the ranks around her grew. But even that was nothing compared with coming to VCU.

“Everything [was] on a different scale,” Hallgrímsdóttir said, and for someone who describes herself as “not the most outgoing person,” it was a huge adjustment.

“Going to competitions was the biggest change for me,” she said. “[At home] I would be competing with my best friend and maybe a couple of other people. And it was always the same people. So going to meets and having three different flights of hammer was something I was definitely not used to.”

But it didn’t take long to get acclimated.

Ahead of Hallgrímsdóttir’s first meet with VCU, Tussing recalls her bold – and prescient – assertion that she would break the school record and set a personal record on her first two throws. As is her wont, she did just that.

“It’s like, ‘How did you predict that? How did you just will that to happen?’” Tussing said. “And she just does stuff like that.”

There even have been times he tried to encourage her to be more realistic with her expectations, only to watch as she continues to surpass herself.

“In the back of your mind, you know at some point it’s not going to happen [anymore],” Tussing said of Hallgrímsdóttir’s upward trajectory after three years of working together. “Like, nobody just continues to go straight up like that; you’re going to hit some hard times eventually. But to this point, whatever she’s said [she wants to do], she has ended up going and doing it.

Now in the midst of the 2024-25 indoor track and field season, Hallgrímsdóttir hopes to have a few more accolades to check off her list by the end of the school year. Then, she plans to sit out the outdoor season next fall to concentrate on the world championships in September before resuming her collegiate career as a fifth-year student in the 2026 outdoor season.

Hallgrímsdóttir and Tussing have been side by side at several big international competitions as she represents Iceland. Last year, they traveled to the European championships immediately after the NCAA competition, arriving in Italy barely a day before her first throw. She finished 17th of out 30 competitors.

“It was exciting to be there and know that you weren’t probably at your best but still were amongst the top 20 people in that opportunity,” Tussing said. “Then, it’s like, ‘OK, what more can we do?’”

For Hallgrímsdóttir, the ultimate aspiration is about as big as it gets: the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“That’s definitely the big goal,” she said. “But right now I feel like the other ones” – making her way to the top of the NCAA leaderboard and going to the world championships, among others – “are the steps that I need to take to be able to get there. So [I want] to keep making it to those meets, keep making small improvements and working in the right direction.”