When 16-year-old track star Holland Reynolds collapsed just feet away from the finish line during a race for the state championship, even her own coach thought it was all over.
But the high-school junior from San Francisco, who was captured on video staggering towards the finish line but falling on the grassy side of the track before she could cross it, refused to give up.
Reynolds – clearly in pain but with a state championship at stake – stunned the crowd as she picked herself up and crawled across the line.
"I just kept on telling myself, 'I need to finish and I need to cross the line,'" Reynolds told ABC News. "I don't remember falling, but then I remember crawling across the line."
An ambulance whisked her away as soon as she put a foot over the line, and Reynolds, who says she was in "shock" during the big finish, was later diagnosed with dehydration and light hypothermia from her run in the cold weather.
Remarkably, even though the star didn't finish first as she'd hoped, her time helped secure the state championship for her team.
Her coach, Jim Tracy, recalls the excruciating moment when he knew something was wrong. "I called out to her. I said, 'Holland are you all right?'' Tracy said. "She just kept going – staggering and staggering."
But, he said, he reveled in the inspiring ending.
"We won," he said. "And it was a great feeling."
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