Young brings back gold

Track and field helped save Kevin Young a long time ago, and now he wants to return the favor. So he's bringing his world-record-setting, Olympic-gold-medal-winning ability from Los Angeles to Franklin Field for the 100th version of the Penn Relays, an event that has always meant so much to the sport of he loves. "In this day and age," said Young, who will be competing in Saturday's 4x400 meter relay race, "the key issue in track and field is development, and when you go to Penn you see development from its core. The key thing is the young, elementary school athlete?.You'll never find someone who just woke up in college as an elite athlete. You have to persevere." The conviction with which he speaks comes from experience. The ride that took him to Olympic gold two years ago in Barcelona began more than a decade earlier when he joined his high school track team as a gangly, uncoordinated teenager just to get a nice sweatsuit to wear. But in truth, track was more than a way for Young to get some extra clothes. It was a means of survival. The Watts section of Los Angeles where Young grew up was a whirlpool of drugs, gangs and bullets that sucked in many of his contemporaries and left them for dead. While other guys used the sordid elements of life on the streets for gratification, Young turned to sports, knowing it would pay off in the long run. "There were guys who participated [in sports] who were far better than myself, but they decided athletics just wasn't moving fast enough for them," Young said. "While they were selling drugs they always seemed to be on top of the world, and now, 10 years after the fact, a lot of them are dead or in jail. That's real sad to see." While other guys seemed on top of the world to Young at the time, he was at the bottom when he started out in track. The suit was nice, but the competition in high school was difficult for Young, who didn't appear to possess the physical tools to be an athlete. All the flak he received from the people in his neighborhood didn't help. Young remembers the guys who would sit in the stands during practices drinking 40s, smoking weed and heaping all sorts of abuse on him. Through it all, Young practiced what he now preaches. He persevered. "At first, I was just sort of comic relief for those guys," he said. "But I got respect in their eyes because I was doing something I wanted to do." What Young did was develop into one of the top hurdlers in the state. His in-seam eventually grew to 37 inches, and he began winning races. In his senior year, 1984, he finished third in the 110-meter hurdles at the California State Prep Championships. But that wasn't quite good enough for him to get any college scholarship offers. Young had to rely on his GPA to gain admission into UCLA. College just wasn't something you did if you were a member of the six-child Young household; you graduated from high school and went looking for a job. So Young was determined to make the most of his special opportunity. He more than made up for problems in the classroom with his performance on the track, where he blossomed in his sophomore year. Not being on scholarship became a blessing in disguise. "At first it seemed like I had been overlooked, but it worked out because I didn't have the claw of the athletic department to deal with," he said. "It helped me grow, be more mature and more accountable for myself?.I learned to run according to the tone of my own body and not how anyone else wanted me to run." No one could have wanted anything more from Young than the performance he gave in the 400 hurdles at the 1986 NCAA Championships in Indianapolis. The previous year he had failed to qualify for the event, and not much was expected from him in his debut. Track and Field News picked him to finish 10th, but Young shocked everyone except himself by finishing a close second. He just kept improving after that, taking first in the 400 hurdles at the NCAAs in 1987 and 1988 and helping the UCLA 4x400 relay team to victories in both years. The only place to go from there was the 1988 Olympic Trials in the 400 hurdles. Young won his race to earn a ticket to Seoul, South Korea, and fulfill the destiny he had possessed since 1984, when Coca-Cola awarded him the "Future Olympian" award. He got goose bumps when he realized he would be competing alongside the stars he had observed training at UCLA, people like Andre Phillips and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Young had dominated in college, but Seoul was a different story. The media predicted a medal sweep for the Americans in the 400 hurdles, with Phillips, Young and Edwin Moses all in prime contention. But the 22-year-old was unable to live up to the hype and finished a disappointing fourth. "I got caught up in the stresses athletes tend to put themselves under in those situations," he said. "When I took fourth I was pretty despondent, but then I started thinking, 'I just finished fourth at the Olympics.' I started thinking about how I was unproven at UCLA, and how I came out of dodging bullets in Watts. I knew I was very fortunate -- I could have been six feet under." He could have been six feet under, but four years later Young was on top of the world. He improved the consistency of his 13-stride pattern and developed into the world's top 400 hurdler in the months leading up to Barcelona, winning every race he entered in the 1992 European Track and Field season. Still, no one was counting on him to do what he did. Some people said he wouldn't medal, and few even gave it much thought. The husband-wife hurdling duo of David Patrick and Sandra Farmer got most of the attention from the American press. It wasn't long before people were talking about Young. In what may have been the most impressive individual performance of the games, Young got off to such a fast start that it didn't matter when he clipped the last hurdle. He still beat the second-place finisher by nearly a second and shattered Moses' 11-year-old world record with a time of 46.78, the first sub-47-second mark in history. "It's an electric feeling," he said. "You're so turbo-charged it's pathetic. I finally had my gold medal. The fashion I did it in, that felt real good. It was almost like a made-for-TV movie." For that matter, Young's whole life has been worthy of a TV movie, perhaps even one on the big screen. He started out in the dregs of society and became one of the greatest athletes in the world, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds every step of the way. No one is more aware of the drama of his life than Young himself. "If they can do Cool Runnings," he said, "they can do Kevin Young." It would be a movie all the high school and elementary school kids competing at Franklin Field this weekend would do well to watch.