Taylor back on track

American athlete Angelo Taylor has won against odds and is right back on ‘track’.

ATLANAT: US Olympic gold medalist Angelo Taylor is back! Eight years ago, Taylor struck gold at the Sydney Games in the 400 metres hurdles, realising a dream as a 21-year-old that he had been working towards since he graduated from high school four years earlier.

He was also a part of gold medal-winning team in the 4x400 metres in Sydney and two years later he was US champion at 400 metres.

But his career nosedived through injury and legal troubles and it looked like it might never recover. Now he is attempting to bounce back and take on a feat that nobody has previously achieved: to win gold in the 400 metres and the 400 metres hurdles at the Beijing Olympics in August.

“It’s going to be tough, physically and mentally,” Taylor said. “No one has ever attempted it.” The steps of Taylor’s downfall are easy to trace. Four years after his success in Sydney he made the semi-finals of the 400 metres hurdles at the Athens Olympics but failed to qualify for the final.

Shortly afterwards, doctors told him part of the reason. The pains he had been suffering in his shins - sheer agony that he had been trying hard to ignore - were actually stress fractures. Their advice was a professional athlete’s nightmare: take a full year off. Cut to 2006 when he pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of two underage girls and was sentenced to three years’ probation.

There didn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. The sentence, his injuries and the fact that his sporting triumphs were far behind him, brought him low. “I didn’t know if I would run track again because of the injuries...I lost a lot of respect among non-athletes. On the Web and on (athletics) chat groups they thought I was all washed up,” lamented Taylor.

By the time he got back to training full time he was also working full time, as an electrician. His job involved low-voltage work and installing data and telephone cables around Atlanta, where he had lived since childhood.

“I was working an eight-hour job and even then I had to go training and then go home and deal with my two kids. I didn’t get much sleep,” Taylor said.

In fact the children, twin boys born around that time, helped him through, giving him a purpose when he could not train. One turning point came for the 6-foot-2-inch (1.88-metre) runner when in January 2007 he signed with agent Kimberly Holland, who manages a stable of US athletes as CEO of Icon Management.
“He didn’t have a contract at the time.

He was working as an electrician,” said Holland. “My concern primarily was that he’d been away (from the sport). We just built a case for him one meet at a time.

Last year, however, he won world championship bronze in the 400 metres and gold in the 4x400 and that season ranked third in the world at 400 metres and sixth at hurdles.