Against the odds

The case sits inconspicuously in the back corner of the foyer of Larry Young’s Columbia home. Young comments on how one of the gold medals needs to be shined. The National Track and Field Hall of Fame says there should be 30 of them, but Young can only find 25, each denoting a national title that he captured.

Above those 25 medals are two others, these Olympic bronzes. They’re not glitzy and likely wouldn’t catch more than a swift glance from an ignorant passerby. That is, until Young tells his story.

Ironically, the distance runner in high school never had Olympic ambitions. Just after the start of his senior year, Young turned on the television at his parents’ home and saw England’s Don Thompson win a gold medal in the 50K racewalk at the 1960 Olympics. Young was hooked.

“The next day, I went to school and was mimicking what I saw,” Young said. “My coach said, ‘Young, you look pretty good.’ They joked, ‘Young, you can walk as fast as you can run it.’”

It wasn’t until 1965, after Young finished serving in the Navy, that he decided to enter a racewalking competition.

Three years later, he was walking in the Olympics.

As the Games approached, not a single track and field magazine had Young named as a medal contender. He wasn’t even mentioned as a dark horse.

The conditions on the morning of the race were less than ideal. Extensive heat and dense fog made the high-altitude course even more grinding.

He had dined earlier that week with Paul Nihill, an English racewalker who had finished second in the 50K race four years before, and the two talked about the race. They talked about the conditions and the pace. Despite the change in altitude, Nihill insisted the typical 4-hour 10-minute pace would still hold true. Young wasn’t so convinced.

“You guys go out at your 4-hour 10-minute pace, and I’ll see you at 40K,” Young told Nihill.

Sure enough, around the 35K mark, Young surpassed Nihill.

“I went out at a conservative pace,” Young said. “I just let them go. I knew what I was capable of, and I wasn’t going to get sucked into that pace.”

Young took the podium later that day to receive his bronze medal after finishing in 4 hours and 20 minutes.

After the race, teammates congratulated him. But then there were the whispers that the win was a fluke. It was the mistakes of other racewalkers that opened the path for Young, they told him. Young thought of only one way to dispute that claim: Do it again.

He qualified for the Munich Olympics in 1972 and once again finished third. After the race, he walked into the team room to deliver a message: “There’s another fluke, you guys.”

Those 1972 Olympics would be the last for Young.

Young retired when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Games in Moscow, but he still holds the distinction of being the only American to win a long-distance racewalking medal in the Olympics.

Soon after, Young replaced walks around the track with hours in his art studio. Young, who majored in art at Columbia College, began to sculpt.

One of his sculptures stands at the intersection of U.S. 63 and Broadway. There is one in the University Hospital and clinics atrium and others at Columbia College and Stephens College.

Young no longer racewalks. The gravel roads in front of his house aren’t suitable for walking long distances. And he would prefer to spend his time in the studio adjacent to his stone home, anyway.

But inside that home a man still speaks with pride. He remembers the details and his times in nearly every race during his 15-year career.

Young reached an echelon of success in a sport where he and his fellow walkers were viewed as “the ugly ducklings of track and field.” And it’s what is in that trophy case, situated in the corner of the foyer, that tells the end of the story.