Angelo Taylor first seized the track world’s attention in 2000, winning an Olympic gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles from Lane 1, the event’s steepest curve and most difficult task.

The feat in Sydney earned the then 21-year-old speedster from Decatur the Jesse Owens Award, given to USA Track and Field’s top male athlete. He had forged his pure natural speed into the discipline’s precise technical boundries. His promise seemed unlimited.

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Angelo Taylor, a Southwest DeKalb High School graduate, achieves a 47’8’ landing in the triple jump in 1996.

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PAUL KITAGAKI JR./Sacramento Bee

The United States’ trio of Angelo Taylor (left, gold medal), Kerron Clement (center, silver) and Bershawn Jackson (right, bronze) celebrate a sweep in the 400-meter hurdles in the Olympics on Monday in Beijing.

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Angelo Taylor became a star while competing at Georgia Tech.

• Photos: Taylor's career

This week in Beijing, Taylor’s potential finally came to fruition as he once again stood atop an Olympic medal stand in the golden spot. On Tuesday, he won the same event and resurrected a career hobbled by injuries, a lack of focus and embarrassing legal problems — getting caught naked in a car with a 15-year-old girl by DeKalb County police when he was 26. He later got probation, and despite the fallout, endured and persevered.

“You have ups and downs in your life; you just have to keep pushing forward,” Taylor said this week in Beijing, contemplating the journey his life has taken since 2000. “I’m older and wiser, with time and experience. The things that I did go through made me a better person.”

A career nearly destroyed

The 29-year-old Taylor led a U.S. medal sweep in this year’s event, besting his 2000 winning time by a quarter second at 47.25. The victory was historic: Only Edwin Moses, in 1976 and 1984, had won gold medals in the event eight years apart.

Taylor says the 1996 Games inspired him to become an Olympian. But he took a circuitous path to Olympic history. He failed to make the finals in the 2001 and 2003 world championships, often running almost two seconds slower than his best time. In 2004, he made the Olympic team but again failed to reach the finals.

He was hurt for much of that time, it turned out. The constant pounding caused by leaping over 36-inch hurdles at a dead sprint caused back injuries in 2001 and hairline fractures in his shins before the 2004 Olympics. He took a year off.

Taylor said he did not ink major endorsement or speaking deals after Sydney, but found himself with a sudden slew of new friends and associates. “I was young. I definitely was getting a lot of attention,” he said. “It was overwhelming.”

Derrick Adkins, the 1996 Olympic gold medal winner in the 400-meter hurdles and a teammate of Taylor’s at Georgia Tech in the late 1990s, remembers him with tons of raw potential.

“I was an Olympic champion and he was a freshman and very soon afterward he started beating me,” said Adkins, 38. Adkins’ own skills soon started eroding, which was hard on him. It’s hard on all athletes, he said.

Adkins, director of the New Balance Track and Field Armory in New York, which develops young runners with hopes of getting them into college, said it is rare that a track star gets rich.

“There are only a few millionaires who come from track and field, you can count them on one hand — Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis, Marion Jones,” he said.

Shoe deals and meet appearance fees are especially sparse for someone who is not winning. And by late 2004, Taylor certainly fit that bill.

Worse, his actions nearly destroyed his career and could have led to prison time.

In January 2005, a policeman on patrol arrested Taylor after finding him and the 15-year-old nude in a GMC Yukon parked at Fork Creek Mountain Park in south DeKalb. It was nearly 1 a.m. and they had smoked marijuana, police said. Further investigation led to another charge that he had sex with one of the girl’s friends three weeks earlier.

Later, in court, a prosecutor said the girls met Taylor through a relative who was a recent college graduate, who became acquainted with one of the girls while substitute teaching at her high school.

But the girls never cooperated with prosecutors. Also, “one of the victims may have lied about her age to Angelo Taylor,” the prosecutor told the judge. The molestation charge was dropped, and he pleaded guilty in January 2006 to misdemeanor counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was given three years probation at the time.

The girls are not being identified because of their age.

“It could have been a lot worse,” said Taylor’s attorney Keith Adams. “Those were some very serious charges.”

News stories of Taylor’s actions rippled through the Atlanta community. Demetrius Lewis, who played football and ran track with Taylor on state championship teams at Southwest DeKalb High in the mid-1990s, was sad to hear of his former teammate’s troubles. It seemed to happen too often to those who found fame.

“You see it all the time; people screw it up,” said Lewis, who lives in Stockbridge. “A lot of people don’t bounce back.”

Taylor’s father, Angelo Sr., who played football and ran track at Albany State and still lives in the metro area, said he was “angry, disappointed but also very supportive” when he heard the news of his oldest child. “I really couldn’t believe it had happened,” he recalled. “I never had one ounce of problems from Angelo. He was a straight-A student from eighth to 12th grade. He’s still kind of laid-back and shy.”

(Taylor has a brother and sister. Their parents divorced when he was 16. His mother Subrena Glenn-Everett is a school counselor in DeKalb.)

The younger Taylor won’t address the charges directly, saying he wants to move on.

“It was definitely a low point,” he said this week in Beijing, where 17 days of Olympics comes to an end Sunday. “It was definitely a struggle. There was a time when I thought it was never going to end, but not once did I think I was going to give up.”

Back on track

The plea deal allowed Taylor a new focus. He surrounded himself with positive influences and said he had to part with associates because of their habits. But first, he had to eat, so he got a job installing electrical wire in Atlanta. It didn’t pay much but he had to earn a living, especially since he was the father of young twins, Isaiah and Xavier, who are now three years old. He is no longer involved with their mother but spends time with them.

Taylor started work at 5 a.m. each day, which allowed him to work out afternoons. He was up and down ladders all day, and some of the work, he said, was at Georgia Tech, where he had been seven years earlier. (He said he attended Tech for two years and later completed a degree in organizational management and leadership at Morris Brown in 2006.)

He met up with a coach, former Nigerian sprinter Innocent Egbunike. Taylor threw himself into his last chance, working out so hard he often would throw up and then lie down. And then he’d get up and sprint again.

By June 2007, Taylor had improved enough to compete again. He skipped the hurdles in the U.S. Outdoor Championships and ran the flat 400. He threw himself across the finish line to win by one-hundreth of a second.

Taylor was back.

In June, he finished third in the Olympic trials in the 400 hurdles, gaining a spot on the team. Less than 30 minutes later, he competed in another event, the 400, but stopped halfway through the race. He was out of gas. In Beijing, he felt strong and had a clarity.

“I was going over my race plan in my head,” he said. “I can remember walking out to the starting line thinking, here we go again.”

And there he went again.

Two coaches who knew Taylor through good times and bad are proud of his growth.

Buck Godfrey, his football coach at Southwest DeKalb, called him a prodigal son.

“He has shown great resiliency, fortitude and stick-to-it-iveness,” he said. “He almost blew it, but he got it back.”

Napoleon Cobb, his high school track coach who helped Taylor train for the 2004 Olympics, sees a more mature man.

“Even his appearance,” Cobb said. “He has this clean, All-American look.”

Taylor said his twins and his again-prospering career have energized him. “I just want to be an inspiration to other people. You have ups and downs in your life. You just have to keep pushing forward.”

His goal? The 2012 Olympics in London.