GAINESVILLE — If Alida van Daalen becomes an NCAA champion and record-setter Saturday, she’ll fulfill a destiny decades in the making — one the 24-year-old didn’t see coming.
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The Florida star is the daughter of an Olympian mother and a 6-foot-9 father. Yet Jacqueline Goormachtigh, a discus thrower who represented the Netherlands at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, didn’t push her daughter toward the event.
She simply wanted her children to play sports and get out of the house.
Van Daalen was 14 when she discovered just how accomplished her mother had been. Digging through a box of newspaper clippings, she uncovered a résumé her mother had kept to herself.
“I should have known she was famous,” van Daalen told the Orlando Sentinel. “A lot of people knew her at the track too, and I was like, ‘Why do they know my mom?’”
When van Daalen eventually gravitated toward the discus and shot put, Goormachtigh realized her daughter had chosen the same path she once traveled.
“She explained, ‘I wanted you to choose your own destiny,’” van Daalen said. “‘I wanted you to choose your own sport, and it’s just so weird that you chose the one that I did.’”
Once mother and daughter were on the same page, Goormachtigh had one request: “You need to try and break my, your family record, because I’m still the best.”
Van Daalen surpassed her mother’s personal best two years ago. Now she’s threatening every record in the book.
Her throw of 218 feet, 10 inches set an SEC Championship meet record, and her toss of 227-5 at the East Preliminary on May 30 is the longest throw ever recorded at an NCAA-sanctioned event.
Now she has her sights set on Fresno State’s Cierra Jackson’s NCAA Championships’ mark of 215-11, set in 2025 when she edged van Daalen for the national title.
“She wants to be the best ever in the discus,” her coach Eric Werskey said.
Van Daalen possesses all the tools required to launch a 2.2-pound discus distances few women on Earth can match.
She stands 6-foot-3, can power clean 265 pounds and possesses unusual agility and elite coordination. Just as important, she developed the mental approach needed to maximize her gifts.
“Whenever you put pressure on something, it’s not gonna go far, especially in throwing,” she said.
That insight paid off at the SEC Championships.
Determined to break her conference record, van Daalen pressed throughout the competition until head coach Mike Holloway pulled her aside before her final attempt.
“I was like, ‘Alida, you got the competition won, stop trying to throw far, work on your technique, and she threw further,’” Holloway recalled.
Moments later, she produced the best throw in SEC history.
“Had nothing to do with me,” Holloway said. “I just asked her to calm down.”
Van Daalen’s record-setting rise at Florida nearly never happened.
Werskey, then in his final season at Iowa, first contacted her through social media in 2021.
“She was adamant on staying with her mom and training in the Netherlands,” he recalled. “She told me no, probably three or four times.”
After arriving at Florida and helping guide the Gators to men’s and women’s championships in 2022, Werskey tried again.
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“She told me no like three or four more times,” he said.
Running out of options, Werskey reached out directly to Goormachtigh, who agreed to a conservation.
A 30-minute Zoom call followed by a campus visit in October 2022 convinced van Daalen to sign with Florida the following month.
“I can feel people from just how they talk — I’m a very feelings person,” van Daalen said. “I could feel that this was a good man, and I just really needed that after everything that I’ve been through.”
Van Daalen declined to discuss specifics, but she said the COVID shutdown contributed to PTSD and mild depression.
“I wanted a fresh start,” she said.
She quickly validated her decision.
In March of 2023, van Daalen won the SEC indoor shot put title with a school-record shot put throw of 61 feet, 2 ¾ inches.
Still, the discus remained her true passion.
“She does the shot put for the team,” Holloway said. “The discus is for her, and the team as well, but the discus is her baby.”
Van Daalen’s blend of power, technique and timing has helped Florida’s women for a national title run. She finished third in the shot put Thursday with a school-record throw of 59-5½ and will begin Saturday’s team-title push when the discus competition starts at 2:30 p.m. in Eugene, Oregon.
“There’s a joke, to get to the throwing field, you got to cross the train tracks, make a left at a mile-and-a-half, and then cross another railroad,” said Werskey, a champion thrower himself at Auburn. “Those are legit stories. But whenever they do get put on display, they put on a show.”
Van Daalen’s athletic journey began long before she discovered discus.
She tried gymnastics and swimming. She ran sprints, competed in the long and high jump, threw the javelin and even attempted the 1,000-meter run.
“I hated that,” she said, with her infectious laugh. “I was definitely not a long-distance kid.”
As a 9-year-old shot putter, she found a different motivation.
“I started winning,” she said. “I like winning.”
When she took up discus at age 11, van Daalen found her calling. Three years later, she broke the Dutch under-16 record.
The Olympic rings hanging from her necklace remind her how far she has come. Van Daalen represented the Netherlands in the 2024 Games in Paris and won gold medals in both the shot put and discus at the European U23 Championships.
Since arriving at Florida, she has rewritten school records and collected All-SEC and All-American honors.
Now she has one more opportunity to claim the NCAA title in the event she was born to throw.
“I just need to not put too much pressure on myself, because I know I’m capable,” she said. “I just need to stay relaxed and execute. I already knew that last year, but just let it slip away. It was a little painful.
“But you need to learn and go through those moments to get stronger and get better.”
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Edgar Thompson can be reached at [email protected]