EUGENE, Ore. » Bryan Clay clapped and cheered along with everyone else at Hayward Field after Ashton Eaton finished rewriting the decathlon world record Saturday with a gutty personal-best time in the 1,500 meters.

Eaton’s performance at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials felt like a two-day coronation of the nation’s next great decathlete, starting with his world-record time of 10.21 seconds in the 100 meters on Friday and ending with a PR of 4:14.48 in the 1,500 to set the overall world record.

As Clay hugged Eaton on the track near the west grandstand, just a few yards away from where his own Olympic hopes crashed to the ground, he couldn’t help but wonder what might have been.

"I’m a fan of the decathlon, so to be a part of that and to experience that is huge," said Clay, a graduate of Castle High in Kaneohe. "It’s kind of bittersweet, because I wish it could’ve been me."

Eaton’s total topped Roman Sebrle’s previous record of 9,026 and shattered Clay’s U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials record of 8,832.

Clay established that mark in 2008, on his way to a gold medal at the Beijing Games. Having also won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Clay was aiming to become the first decathlete to earn three Olympic medals. But his dreams were dashed after he stumbled early on Saturday, quickly drawing comparisons to Dan O’Brien’s no-height in the pole vault at the 1992 Trials that kept him out of the Olympics that year.

"It’s the nature of the sport," Clay said.

He started the day in third place, behind Eaton and eventual second-place finisher Trey Hardee, needing a top-three finish and a minimum 8,200 points to meet the Olympic A standard. He was on pace to accomplish both feats, until Saturday’s first event, the 110 hurdles.

Clay clipped the ninth hurdle with his foot, lost his balance and then crashed into the 10th and last hurdle, knocking it down with his hands before walking across the finish line in 16.81 seconds. Since he’d hit the hurdle with his hands, Clay assumed he’d be disqualified from the event, and he threw his sunglasses before sitting down on the track, head in hands, for several minutes.

"It’s such a big blow, to have it go bad, especially when it was going good up to that point," Clay said. "To have one event just take it all away … it just hurts, there’s just no other way to put it."

Clay did initially receive a DQ in the 110s, his no-score in the event virtually ensuring he wouldn’t finish in the top three or reach the A standard. He came back out for the discus a half-hour later, receiving a huge ovation from the Hayward Field crowd before each throw but appearing distraught the whole time.

"It’s just one of those things you want to just bury your head somewhere and go cry, and you can’t, so it’s this internal battle of trying to muster out as much as you’ve got but at the same time, you’re hurting inside," he said.

His first two attempts in the discus sailed foul, but on his third try, he ripped off a huge throw that landed past the 50-meter line (164 feet) — more than enough to win the event — but a foot foul negated the throw. That left Clay without a mark in the discus, his second consecutive event without a score.

Or so he thought.

About five minutes after finishing the discus, Clay learned that he’d won his appeal of the 110-hurdle result, and USA Track and Field reinstated his time, determining after review that he’d hit the last hurdle with his hands inadvertently and awarding him 644 points in the event. Only now, it was his no-score in the discus that was going to keep him out of the London Games.

"Now I want to just kick myself," he said. "They said I was disqualified, so the whole time I was doing discus, my mind just wasn’t there.

"If I had maybe been able to put it together in discus, things might have gone a little better. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, I guess."

Clay soldiered on, finishing the final three events — and taking second in the javelin with a throw of 224-3 — after some encouragement from his coaches and his wife and kids, who were watching from the stands.

"It was important to finish," he said. "I knew I needed to finish, I didn’t want to finish, but my coaches, thank goodness for them, making me finish.

"The last thing I want to do is look back on things and have my kids remember the time that I didn’t finish the decathlon."

For now, the 32-year-old Clay is looking forward to continuing decathlon competition, insisting that he’s not quite ready to call it a career.

"The next move is just to get refocused and figure out what’s going to happen for the rest of the summer, and then come back out and give it another shot," he said.