Stephanie Brown Trafton (born December 1, 1979) is an American track and field athlete who won the discus throwing gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Brown Trafton has said she was inspired to become an Olympian as a 4-year-old watching Mary Lou Retton perform in the 1984 Summer Olympics.

[7] Brown Trafton competed in the 2004 Olympic Trials in Sacramento, California in both the shot put and the discus throw.

In the first throw of the discus final, she threw a 9-foot personal best of 201 feet 3 inches, surpassing the international A-standard mark, and qualified for her first Olympic team.

In August 2004, Brown Trafton competed at the Athens Games, and her best mark in the qualifying round failed to advance her to the finals.

Coming into the Beijing Olympics, her personal best was 217 feet 1 inch (66.17 m), achieved at the Hartnell Throwers Meet in Salinas, California.

Now, I want to hit at least 64 meters every timeUntil a June 21, 2008 mark of 218 feet 1 inch (66.47 m) by Romanian Nicoleta Grasu,[11][12] this throw stood as the longest on record anywhere in the world in 2008.

[5] Asked to explain her dramatic improvement, Brown Trafton pointed to a key difference in her training regimen.

[10] Although called by the mainstream American sports press "an unlikely savior of U.S. pride"[14] and a "field filler more than a medal contender",[15] a radically improved Brown Trafton actually came to Beijing with a reasonable possibility of winning.

[18] By the sixth round, it was unnecessary for her to throw to win the gold medal, as the two remaining competitors had not bettered her initial mark.

[9] It was the fourth medal in American history, behind Leslie Deniz' silver won at the politically boycotted 1984 Summer Olympics.

When viewed against the prism of 2008-only performances, the only members of the field other than Brown Trafton to better the winning 212 feet 5 inches (64.74 m) mark were Aretha Thurmond, Nicoleta Grasu and Yarelis Barrios.

[8] Perhaps, as Brown Trafton herself remarked, the competition was "a little more open" thanks to the banning of the prohibitive favorite, Russian Darya Pishchalnikova, for suspicion of doping.

[17] Unlike many 21st-century American Olympians, Brown Trafton had a day job as she prepared for the Beijing Games.

Using skills rooted in her undergraduate degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, she is the Director of Operations for Track & Field and Cross Country sports at California State University, Sacramento,[24] and she worked as a computer-assisted designer for an environmental consulting firm in Sacramento, California called Sycamore Environmental Consultants, Inc.

[3] Noting the difficulties her sport has had with doping, she set a personal goal for the future of being "the first world-record holder that's a clean world record".

[28] At the 2012 United States Olympic Trials, the preliminary round was held in rainy conditions that were difficult for all competitors.