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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
At 29, Atlantan Taylor still has his hurdles to clear
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing — The alarm would go off at 4. The work would start at 5. The alarm used to trigger the athlete’s training day. Now it was talking to an electrician: “Get up. You need the money. You lost your Nike deal. Get up. Now.”
“I did mostly low-voltage stuff,” said Angelo Taylor. “Up and down the ladder. We did the new dorms at Georgia Tech.”
Did they know him? How often would somebody walk by at Tech, a school Taylor once attended, and never realize the guy on the ladder doing the low-voltage work used to be a world-class athlete?
How many times did somebody walk by the parked Honda in a track stadium behind Turner Field in the early afternoon and see a man asleep in the car? A coach would arrive at 2 p.m. and bang on the window so the man would wake up. Another alarm. “Get up. You’re not that fast any more. You’re not that young any more. Do you really want to go back to the Olympics? Get up. Now.”
The alarm went off in Angelo Taylor’s head.
He is up now. Against a backdrop of physical, emotional and legal problems, the two-time gold-medalist from Southwest DeKalb High made his third Olympic team in the 400-meter hurdles.
He is 29 years old. Of the other 25 athletes in the 400, 21 are younger than Taylor.
It wasn’t that long ago when he was the young one — 21 and four years out of high school, he won two gold medals in Sydney. He won the 400 hurdles and ran a prelim for the 4x400 relay team. U.S. track officials named him winner of the Jesse Owens Award as its athlete.
Taylor made the Olympic team again in 2004. But soon after, his career deteriorated and his life went with it. Hurdles, the literal and figurative kind, nearly destroyed him. He had stress fractures in his shins. Doctors suggested surgery but Taylor passed, opting to take a year off.
Other damage was self-inflicted. In 2005, Taylor was arrested for having sex with a minor. He eventually pled guilty in 2006 to contributing to the delinquency of two underage girls and was sentenced to three years probation and fined.
“Sometimes in life you have your ups and downs,” Taylor said. “In my life, I’ve always had to go down that rocky road. But I’ve tried to stay positive.”
At some point, he realized he needed to grow up. He felt he needed to be a better example for his twin sons, Xavier and Isaiah, now 3. He knew he wanted to get back to the Olympics. He met with a coach, former Nigerian sprinter Innocent Egbunike. The two formed a partnership. Taylor became more spiritual. He worked in the morning and trained in the afternoon.
But these things never start out well.
“He was out of shape,” Egbunike said. “To be honest, he would throw up a lot and lie flat on the ground. But when I would say, ‘Let’s stop right here,’ he would say, ‘No, I’m going to continue.’ And he would still be throwing up. He struggled, but he did it. He had a vision.”
Taylor was asked what he considered the low moment. Easy answer.
“It would be [getting up at] 4 in the morning and going to work,” he said. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ But I kept praying, asking the Lord to please just give me another chance. I never thought I would make it this far.”
It took a while. Promoters wouldn’t let him into meets, mostly because he hadn’t been competing. The sport seemed to turn its back on him.
“It embarrassed me at first,” Taylor said.
He left the electricians job in early 2007 to devote more time to track. His times dropped. Remarkably, he finished third in the trials with a time of 48.42 to make the team.
Don’t trust the time? Taylor wears a bracelet that reads, “Test me. I’m clean.” He’s an advocate of cleaning up the sport. Unfortunately, it’s too late to save one of his golds. Antonio Pettigrew, a teammate in the Sydney relay, admitted using EPO and HGH. The IOC has stripped the team.
“I was on the relay team with someone who was dirty,” Taylor said. “That’s just the way it is.”
There are no relay teammates to worry about this time. Taylor made it here on his own. If it doesn’t work out, there’s a ladder and an alarm clock waiting for him.
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