Trey Cunningham’s Breakthrough Season

It took Trey Cunningham exactly thirteen seconds to run 110 meters and leap over ten hurdles to take first place at the Paris Diamond League a few weeks ago, equalling his personal best and marking another victory in a season that has been nothing short of a breakthrough for the young athlete. After two difficult years—including 2024, when he missed a trip to the Olympics—he is performing at an impressive new level after publicly coming out as gay last summer, one of the rare elite athletes to do so while actively competing. Even after writing his master’s thesis on sports psychology, Cunningham can’t say whether the two are directly related, but he affirms that he is running this season as his fullest self. “It was for me, just to be one hundred percent authentic, transparent, and not holding back any part of me,” he explains about his decision to come out. “My coach was really big on this, like, ‘You have to be totally confident in yourself and whatever that means to you on that track.’”

A native of Winfield, Alabama, Cunningham admits he does not have the “typical professional athlete story.” He recalls being the fast kid on the playground growing up, but as a self-proclaimed “nerd,” he preferred spending his time with books or video games until seventh grade, when he joined his cousin on the track one day. “I fell in love with it,” he recalls. “Also not the typical track story—I picked hurdles. You could say I do love throwing myself at solid objects for some reason at a high rate of speed.”

By his senior year of high school, Cunningham was competing well enough to consider making it a career, and he chose to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he majored in public relations before getting his master’s degree in sports management. “I’m so fascinated by the brain, but as I’ve gotten older, I realized I didn’t really like the biology part of it, like why the brain’s built this way,” he says about shifting his focus to sports psychology to write his thesis on burnout in athletes. “I just want to know why you tick this certain way.”

It was while researching and writing that thesis, which focused on the correlation between personality and propensity for burnout, that he realized he was suffering from the same ailment himself. After a silver medal at the world championships in 2022, Cunningham found himself facing a common predicament for elite athletes, who train tirelessly for months a year, often for a few mere seconds of competition. “It was the longest season I’ve ever had; it felt like three hundred and sixty-five days of training and competing. I was just so tired and it was something more than just the physical tiredness of competing that long,” he recalls. “I couldn’t figure it out, which is wild of me. I love to figure all this stuff out, and I was sitting in my sports psychologist’s office and I was like, ‘I think I’m burnt out,’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I think you are too.’”

After years of injuries, Cunningham says he has learned the importance of keeping himself motivated both on and off the track, and that focus has helped him bounce back after a few difficult seasons to find the success is having this year, during which he has notched a historic string of wins in his main event both at home in the United States and now across Europe. “I’m not a quitter innately. I want to do well at what I want to do, and I’m lucky enough that I actually do love track and field,” he says. “I’ve got a good support team around me. They believed in me and didn’t really let me quit when I wanted to. Mainly, I doubled down on the sports psychology part of it and I think that’s kept me more grounded in the fact that this can be a process. It’s not going to be the easiest thing in the world, and you do have to put the work in still, and you can find joy in doing the work. I think that was the hardest part of the past two years was just like, why am I doing this? You ask that big question. You don’t see much result in this sport unless you’re on top, because it only rewards people that win. I think finding that beauty in the process again was a big part of this year.”

Now twenty-six years old, Cunningham had been out to his friends and family long before he made his public announcement last summer in the New York Times, explaining then, “We say our goals out loud. If there’s something we want to achieve, we say it. Putting something in words makes it real.” Part of the decision, he admits, was personal, to allow himself to compete without the additional burden of hiding a part of himself. “There’s something incredibly powerful in being so authentic. A lot of people have told me that they appreciate me being around because I’m authentic. I’m always going to be truthful, I’m honest. I’m shooting it like it is and I’m being me,” he adds. “I feel like when you have to basically put a mask on to hide something because you feel like it’s going to offend somebody or make them uncomfortable, it’s an oxymoron because you’re making yourself uncomfortable.”

Looking around at the wider world of elite sports, with its striking dearth of out LGBTQ+ people, Cunningham also felt a responsibility of sorts. “It took me a while to be okay with being gay, and that was the other reason,” he explains. “I still feel like some kids feel that way. They feel like they have to come out, so I did it for a kid like me in some other town.” Without a role model to follow while he was growing up, Cunningham hopes that he can now serve as one for the next generation. “I want them to know that it’ll be okay. At the end of the day, it’ll be okay,” he says. “It might not be the easiest at home if they’re younger, but when you get older, you get to decide who your family is, who you want to be around, who treats you nicely, who you allow in your space, and that’s hard for a lot of people to grasp.”

Looking forward during this exceptional season, Cunningham is focused on becoming the “best hurdler ever” but says he also sees a future for himself putting his thesis to use and helping advance the field of sports psychology. “I’ve always thought about going to get a doctorate or PhD, and I want to stay in sports, but looking at some of the programs, sports psychology is not under the umbrella of clinical psychology. Sports psychologists can only really be consultants; they’re not clinicians,” he explains. “I think that’s an interesting space that can improve, just because it is a very niche area, high-performing athletes. I understand that’s not serving the larger public, but they have this different psyche, they have an interesting way of viewing the world, and I think if we can find a clinical way to help high-performing athletes, it will open a new avenue in psychology, just because it’s never been studied before.”

But at the end of day, Cunningham insists that the most important lesson he’s learned for mental health is one that could apply to anyone. “You have to keep it fun, you have to continually find ways to make it fun, because it can get monotonous, just constantly beating our bodies every day,” he says. “If you don’t make it fun, it kind of defeats the purpose of doing it, I would say. We do sports because it’s a game. It brings us all together, it’s fun, that’s why you do it in the first place. I think that’s really helped me, trying to find the fun in everything, every single day has helped a lot.”