4 Years and Counting

Atlanta’s 1996 Olympic flame is still ablaze, yet some young Ventura County athletes with a burning desire to compete in the Games are looking even further ahead: to Sydney, Australia, in the year 2000.

They live in every corner of the county. They partake in disparate sporting endeavors. And they have already tasted success on a national level.

Debbie Chan of Port Hueneme is a 15-year-old pint-size dynamo with a 90-mph kick. She qualified for the inaugural junior world taekwondo championship in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month by winning the national championship--then only her second competitive tournament.

Cyclist Sam Baker, 15, of Casitas Springs won three medals earlier this month in the Junior National Cycling Championship in Wisconsin only six months after taking up road-bike racing.

Thousand Oaks distance runner Kim Mortensen, 18, this season shattered a bevy of national high school running records, including the 3,200-meter mark by more than 11 seconds.

And Troy Dumais, a 16-year-old diver from Ventura, came agonizingly close to becoming the youngest male diver since the storied Greg Louganis to make the U.S. Olympic team when he finished third in last month’s Olympic trials.

These triumphs are merely the first rounds in these teenage athletes’ drive to kick harder, run faster, bicycle quicker and dive better on their way to the main event: the Olympics. But these budding Olympians are keeping their quest in perspective too.

Yes, they work hard. Yes, their dedication demands a degree of sacrifice. But ask them if their sport is their life, the Olympics their obsession, and the answer is invariably no. While that may appear to be a contradiction, the coaches and athletes insist it is not.

“What I believe it all comes down to is passion of purpose,� said Scott Fujii, a former U.S. taekwondo team member who will begin training Debbie Chan when the nation’s first elite taekwondo training center opens next month in Agoura Hills.

“If they’re really loving what they’re doing, they’re really into what they’re doing, then they’re able to enjoy what they’re doing without giving up everything else in their life. So there is no sacrifice.�

Debbie Chan

At 5-foot-2 and 92 pounds, the quiet, unfailingly polite Debbie appears anything but a fighting machine. And indeed, until last year, she was not.

She walked into the Fighting Tigers Taekwondo academy in a Port Hueneme strip mall on the day the studio opened in 1991. The martial arts school is two blocks from her home and across the parking lot from her parents’ Chinese restaurant.

It was 3 1/2 years before she fought competitively.

“I just didn’t want to fight,� Debbie said. “I wasn’t in taekwondo for fighting; I was in it for myself. I just wanted to make myself a better person through discipline and also self-defense. I just wanted to have fun also.�

Finally, Debbie entered the state championship last year in the finweight division, the lightest of taekwondo’s eight weight categories. She placed second, qualifying for the national championships. Then Debbie took the national title, putting her on the junior national team and earning a stint in May at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Her international experience proved brief--Debbie lost to her first opponent. She attributes her loss to changing her fighting strategy from an offensive to a defensive style at the behest of the national-level coaches, who weren’t familiar with her.

“The way I lost was really horrible: listening to my coach,� said the Santa Clara High School student, adding that she won’t make the same mistake again. “I didn’t want to disrespect him. I’m just going to be my own coach next time.�

Debbie’s coaches say her success is due partly to genetics: There is little competition in her lightweight division. But she is also mentally disciplined, willing to train five days a week before and after school to achieve the needed speed and technique.

Her timing is right too.

Taekwondo becomes a medal sport in Australia for the first time. It is already the most popular martial art in the world, said Robert Ferguson, Debbie’s coach, who also publishes a bimonthly martial arts magazine. And with adherents attracted by its spectacular style--the majority of its moves involve kicking, far more than other martial arts--its growth is continuing.

“You’re going to see a kid like Debbie jumping up in the air doing a full splits and landing on a taco sandwich or something [next century],� Ferguson predicts.

Debbie starts training this week for a place on the senior team at next year’s world championships. After that . . .

“I want to represent the U.S. in Australia in the year 2000,� Chan said. “But that’s going to take a lot of hard work.�

Ferguson believes Debbie has the discipline to make it.

“If I say kick 20 times, she doesn’t say, ‘Really?’ She just does it and then maybe puts in an extra 10--without me asking,� he said. But, he said, the deciding factor for any athlete has nothing to do with coaching. “I like them to have their own individuality. That will take them a long way in life.�

Sam Baker

Individuality is something cyclist Sam Baker has in abundance.

He doesn’t particularly like team sports--or mainstream ones.

“I don’t like going in the main groove with everybody else,� said the Ojai Valley resident who sports closely cropped, dyed hair and enjoys such punk rock bands as Naked Aggression. “I do what I want to do. Nobody knows anything about cycling. That’s what I like.�

The self-proclaimed bike junkie received his first at age 5.

“He popped the training wheels off that day,� recalls his stepfather, Rusty Aldrich, “and he’s been going ever since.�

Sam started mountain-bike racing at age 11. But he grew bored with it, much to the relief of his parents, who had endured four years of waiting for their son to descend teeth-chattering mountain trails in one piece.

In January, Sam started road racing. Four months later, at the state championships, he took third in the 20-kilometer time trial in the 15-to-16-year-old age group, second in the 25-mile road race and first in the criterium, a race conducted on a roped-off street circuit.

In the latter event he beat every rider in his age category, plus all but one older competitor, as well. The newcomer’s accomplishment did not endear him to the parents of the other competitors, said Aldrich, laughing.

“Here’s a kid who has been riding road bikes since January and he’s got a piece of every medal in the state of California,� Aldrich said.

Earlier this month at the junior nationals, Sam won a trio of medals--including a third-place finish in the 500-meter time trial. A lack of experience may have made the difference, especially since he owned the fastest qualifying time in the sprints, Sam said.

“The guys I was going up against have at least two more years of training,� he said. “If I had been racing road bikes for three or four years, I probably would have got in.�

Already, people have started asking him about the Olympics. And Sam has started thinking about the Games.

“The idea of the Olympics just keeps growing as I keep riding,� he said.

But there remains a long way to go.

For instance, Sam is seeking sponsors to help defray expenses his family conservatively estimates at $3,000 since January. Bicycle prices--Sam owns eight--can run as high as $2,500 apiece. Travel expenses, including the 90-mile round-trip twice weekly to the nearest bike track in Encino, are not inexpensive either.

Meanwhile, the Buena High student keeps cardboard jersey numbers taped to his bedroom wall, each carefully annotated with race date, his time and how he placed as a visible reminder of his record--and to spur him toward the future.

“I try to be casual about it,� he says of his Olympic aspirations. “I’m not obsessing with it like it’s my whole life. I couldn’t make it my whole life because I would probably get tired of it.�

Kim Mortensen

Conejo Valley resident Kim Mortensen has also hit the fast track in the last year.

A very fast track.

After a high school career as a solid but middle-of-the-pack distance runner, the 5-foot-2 1/2-inch, 100-pound girl began gaining speed in her senior year.

So much speed in fact, that she won the national high school cross-country title in December in San Diego. The Thousand Oaks High student followed that by clocking the third-fastest junior 3,000 meter time this year--in the world. Finally, she won the state 3,200-meter championship and ended up knocking almost a minute off her time at the distance within a year.

“She is one of the most exciting distance runners I’ve ever seen at her age,� said Eric Peterson, head women’s cross-country coach at UCLA, who recruited Mortensen to a track scholarship. “But more importantly, the amount of improvement she realized from the completion of her junior season to the completion of her senior season was higher than maybe we’ve ever seen.�

The difference in her performance was more mental than physical, she said. Still, her main goal was simply to run as well as she could.

“I try not to set goals because they can be letdowns and put negative thoughts in your mind,� Kim said. “If you work hard consistently, it will pay off.�

People figure the next step is the Olympics.

“I don’t really think about it,� she said. “I just run for fun. My mom always said take it one step at a time, because anything could happen. I could take up hockey, though that’s not likely.�

In fact, Kim is just as excited about going to a university, living away from home and meeting new people this fall as continuing her running career.

That doesn’t mean Kim isn’t dedicated to running--she remains in training. But she also enjoys singing in the church choir, as well as hiking and biking.

Peterson finds that refreshing--and probably beneficial to her athletic career.

“It helps keep her life really well-rounded,� he said. “[Running] seems to be an addition to Kim’s life and not the central thing. . . . In individual sports, the very top people who have ever performed seem to have balance to their life.�

When pressed, Kim acknowledges she has allowed herself to dream--just a little--about whether an Olympics is in her future.

“If I’m still interested in running and doing as well as I do now, I’ll do my best to qualify and take it from there,� she said. “It would be so great to get there. To win a medal, I just couldn’t fathom it.�

Troy Dumais

Troy Dumais, who begins his junior year at Buena High this fall, has come the closest to discovering what it feels like to qualify for an Olympics.

He placed third in the Olympic diving trials last month, just missing out on a spot on the team.

This despite being far younger than most other competitors and nailing a perfect 10 score on one dive--the first 10 of his career--and the top score for a single dive in the entire competition.

“I wasn’t crushed at all,� Troy said. “I was very happy. I couldn’t believe what I just did. I would love to have been on the Olympic team, but some things just aren’t meant to happen. Hopefully, 2000 is meant to happen in Sydney.�

Troy’s mental resilience comes partly from years of competitive diving--he started at age 6.

Troy has four siblings who dive. So serious is the family that three years ago his parents bought a Glendale house so their children would have a place to stay close to their USC training facility during weekends and summers.

Especially alluring to Troy is hurling himself off the 10-meter--about 35 feet high--platform diving board.

“I like to dive off high things,� he said. “I wish there was something higher.�

During the summer, Troy trains 4 1/2 hours a day, six days a week; during the school year training sessions are about two hours shorter. When not diving he enjoys other sports, as well as solitary pursuits such as jigsaw puzzles and woodworking.

He doesn’t see his stringent regimen as a sacrifice. But it breeds the toughness necessary for competitive sport--and more.

“Don’t let anything defeat you,� he said. “That applies to life itself. You can’t go on saying, ‘I could have done this, I should have done this.’ . . . You can’t give up no matter what.�

It is that attitude Troy hopes will carry him to Australia.

“Four more years, that’s all it is,� he said. “I hope it’s going to happen. But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen--some things aren’t meant to be.�