EUGENE, Ore. -- Her Blackberry was convulsing. Eighty messages at once zoomed through the wireless world.

The smart phone was confused. It caught its breath. Moments later, another 70 e-mails and text messages and voice mails rushed in.

Richmond's Queen Harrison was living life in the Olympic fast lane.

With her 400-meter hurdle race on national television, the whole world knew. She finished second in a hazardous race at the U.S. Olympic trials. The 19-year-old Hermitage High graduate made the U.S. Olympic team. The rising junior at Virginia Tech wasn't in Blacksburg anymore. It's another 'B' word. She is bound for Beijing.

It's serious, global business, especially as Harrison continues to carefully nurse a left hamstring pull.

So, yesterday, Harrison, somewhat reluctantly but strategically, scratched out of the 100-meter hurdles, which is set to begin tomorrow in Eugene.

"We'd always said, 'If the 400 meters goes the way we want it go, we'll just scratch out of the 100,' " Virginia Tech hurdles coach Lawrence Johnson told The Times-Dispatch. "So now we can focus on getting healthy. Trying to do two different events is tough in an event like the Olympic Games. You've got to prioritize."

As he spoke, Harrison sat beside him and spread cream cheese on her breakfast bagel at her Eugene hotel. For the past few days, she has been digesting the reality that she's an Olympian, this former basketball star who was heading into her sophomore year at Hermitage when the 2004 Athens Olympics were held.

"Surreal," she said of her dramatic second-place finish, the inundation of calls and emails and her stunning position.

The calm that keeps her a focused track athlete had returned after the emotions and whirlwind of Sunday and Monday. She took time to reflect on her mindset coming into these trials.

"I was always really confident in my ability and at the level I was training," she said, while admitting that the hamstring pull she suffered mid-June at the NCAA championships allowed some doubt to creep in.

But, she said, the stage for the 400-meter hurdles final, in jam-packed Hayward Field, provided a new "opportunity where I really punched it, and I was fighting for the thing.''

Translation: she was never in a race so competitive, so important and that she wanted so bad as Sunday's 400-meter trials final.

With a shy smile, she added. "Coming here, I won't say I expected to go the Olympics, but I felt I belonged."

The race remains breathtaking. (It can be viewed at www.nbcolympics.com) And to hear her talk about it, it was a sort of Zen experience.

"A calm really did come over me," she said of heading to the start. "It's weird, in smaller situations, I tend to be a little more tense than when I come to a big meet. I can get into a zone and all I see is tunnel vision."

Her preliminary times placed her in the unfriendly Lane Eight, the farthest outside.

"I'm out here in Lane Eight, I've got to get myself in a good situation," she said of her thought process as the race began. "I have to make sure I'm in the game . . . I executed my race really, really well . . . I went over it in my head hundreds of times the night before."

As the group of fast women cleared the ninth of 10 hurdles, Miriam Barnes, in Lane Seven, fell over the hurdle, into Harrison's lane. Harrison deftly leapt over and around Barnes to the final hurdle and then burst to finish.

"She fell, but honestly, everyone's making such a big deal of it," said Harrison. "I saw it and I just kept going . . . And then I was running for broke."

When she crossed the finish line, she saw she was second. She fell to her knees.

"It made me a little weak," he said of the moment.

Then she had a negative thought.

"My mindset changed,'' she said. "I thought, 'I just got second.'"

She hadn't finished second all season.

"And we still haven't got the best out of her yet," said Johnson, with his first Olympic-bound athlete. "That's what has us excited as we get her ready for the Olympic Games and go there and contend for a medal for the USA."

Today is, the calendar says, July Fourth. Next month, Harrison knows she'll be an ambassador.

"I love my school, Virginia Tech," she said. "But to have 'USA' on my chest, it just makes me perform that much better because you know what you're representing. You're not just representing your coach, your school, your family. You're representing your entire country. It gives you a real sense of patriotism. It makes you feel really, really good."

So spoke Richmond's Olympic Queen.