MisterLawyer
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Joined: 02 May 2006
{Posts: 363 }
Location: Île-de-France
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 Posted: Fri 22 Aug 2008 22:04 Post subject: Gold Medal Winning Decathlete Bryan Clay |
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Just won the gold medal in the decathlon
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One look at Brian Clay tells you he’s a different kind of decathlete. Absent are the coat-hanger shoulders of a Daley Thompson or the overwhelming size of a Roman Sebrle. Instead, Clay is all lithe, compact power; he appears more like a hurdler than a man capable of huge and explosive jumps and throws. Yet his looks belie his ability. A silver medal in Athens was followed by world championship gold in Helsinki in 2005, and now, clear of injury that has bedevilled him for a couple of seasons, he is once again approaching his best.
Like Tiger Woods, who defines his ethnicity as ‘calibinasian’, Clay has the background to give him a global appeal. He has both an African-American and Japanese-American family background, and he spent his childhood years in Hawaii, part of America in name, but with a style and a culture all of its own.
‘It’s very different to the mainland,’ says Clay. ‘My mom would say, okay kids, go out and play, be back before dark. That’s something you’d never do now.’ Yet Clay was almost lost to athletics on his island paradise. His parents’ divorce, the arrival of a stepfather and a stepbrother and some of the wilful determination that any athlete channels in a positive way almost led him down a less productive path.
‘I guess I was angry, I was uncertain, I was like a lot of adolescent boys,’ he says. ‘It took a time for me to come out of it, to work through it. There wasn’t one particular moment. I suppose by the time I was in college, I got really serious about athletics.’ There Clay also met his future wife, and became a committed Christian, two factors that now anchor his life, and provide the impetus for his own foundation, dedicated to helping underprivileged students.
On the track, though, Clay is no goody two shoes. He fairly bristles when confronted with the old chestnut hurled at decathletes down the years: that they are jack-of-all-trade athletes. ‘I run a 10.3 hundred metres. You get an average guy, he couldn’t probably run a 13 second 100m. Then I run a 21.3 200m, I have just over 13 seconds in the 110m hurdles. I have a long jump of almost 8m, a pole vault over 5m - about 5.15m - I throw the javelin 72m. At a decathlon, I’m at the track for probably twelve hours a day for two days…’
He tails off, his point well made. Buried in those stats are the secrets of Clay’s success. He is that rare competitor who can combine world-class raw speed with big jumps and long throws. No wonder he is so dangerous. Away from the track though, he’s a family guy. ‘I get back from training and I’m straight in the pool with my kids,’ he says. ‘We live in Southern California, so the pool is a pretty good place to be. When I get there and I know the work is done, it’s a good feeling’.
Like all great athletes, Clay has learned the value of being chilled at just the right time…
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http://www.spikesmag.com/blogs/profiles/bryanclay.aspx |
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