Before he competed in Saturday’s shot put final at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials pn Saturday, the public address announcer told the Hayward Field crowd that Tampa Baptist and Florida State graduate Garrett Johnson was a Rhodes scholar. After the 24-year old Johnson failed to register a legal throw in the final, falling out the ring three consecutive times, Johnson admitted it’s hard to be both an academic superstar and an athletic superstar.

Right now, he’ll have to settle for academic superstar. After two years at Oxford, an ocean away from his coach and under almost daily wet conditions, Johnson said lost ground in his event.

The “perfect world” would be to be a strong scholar and shotputer, he said.

“That’s a perfect world, but life is not always perfect,” Johnson said. I was in Oxford for two years. No coach. No training partners. It rains pretty much every day in Oxford. It’s not the best environment. I knew that going, but you just can’t pass up the chance attend Oxford.”

Johnson plans to keep competing in the shot put.

“The strength is there. The power is there, but the timing was off,” he said. “Next year, hopefully a better training environment, train hard and get some big throws.”

He called his trials experience “bittersweet.”

“It’s great to be here but you want to do well when you’re here, and so to not perform at your best is disappointing. But you know, you’ve got to keep it in perspective. It’s still an honor to be here.

Tribune correspndent Patrick O’Neill filed this report