Pain Doesn’t Let Up, but Neither Does She : Former Sprint Cycling Champion Says Neck Problem Is in the Past

So focused is Connie Paraskevin-Young in her quest for Olympic success that she no longer acknowledges the once-mysterious pain in her neck that threatened last year to end her cycling career.

Or, at least, she would like it to appear that way.

“That’s in the past,” said the three-time world sprint cycling champion, a former Olympic speed skater who will represent the United States at Seoul in the first Olympic track cycling event for women.

Surely, though, knowledge that the pain could recur at any time must linger in the subconscious.

It caused her such misery last summer that she thought of giving up the sport. In the World Championships at Vienna, the pain was so intense that she was forced to pack her head and neck in ice until it was time to ride.

She complained of severe headaches and double vision.

That she was able to finish third, marking the sixth straight year that she had come away with a medal, was a testament to her determination and single-mindedness.

“It felt like somebody had put a knife through my head,” she said.

Paraskevin-Young, 27, returned to the United States to try, figuratively, to remove the knife that had cut her down. For months, she faced a battery of tests.

“Just about everything but a spinal tap,” said her husband and coach, Roger Young.

She discovered that she was claustrophobic--”I freaked out during the testing,” she said--but doctors were unable to pinpoint the cause of her pain.

“For all we knew, it could have been a brain tumor,” she said.

She almost quit cycling.

“It’s kind of like putting your finger on an iron or hot stove--you only put it there so many times unless you’re a stupid person,” she said. “You get burned enough and you won’t do it anymore.

“That’s almost how it was with my sprinting. I almost didn’t want to go out there anymore.”

Finally, last January, a chiropractor in Irvine, Dr. Robert Moore, diagnosed her malady as a mechanical dysfunction created by the demands of cycling.

“What happens is that one of the vertebral joints in her neck fixes up,” Moore said. “It kind of locks up. And it approximates some major nerves to a degree that she gets extremely tight.

“A sprinter has to pull up on the handlebars as she turns her head to look behind her--and while her legs are pumping very hard. There’s an extreme amount of pressure and muscle contraction due to the nerve irritation, and in her case it creates a vicious muscle spasm into the skull area.”

Moore is able to alleviate the problem with an upper cervical adjustment. Paraskevin-Young saw him about once a week for four months earlier this year before returning in April to her home in Indianapolis.

When the pain returned, however, she couldn’t find a chiropractor in Indiana who could duplicate the procedure. She returned to Los Angeles last month to work with Moore and will continue seeing him until she leaves for the Olympics Sept. 12.

“I expect her to be absolutely perfect for the Games,” said Moore, who said he will accompany her to Seoul if she isn’t.

Paraskevin-Young, who is reluctant to discuss the problem, has tried to put it out of her mind.

“I have to assume I’m not going to have any problems,” she said.

Paraskevin-Young will have plenty on her mind, though, in Seoul, where she will attempt to reclaim her place as the world’s best woman sprinter, a title she held for three years before Isabelle Nicloso of France ended her reign as world champion in 1985.

Paraskevin-Young, who was born on the Fourth of July in 1961, developed herself into a world champion after taking up cycling and speed skating as a youngster in her native Detroit.

As a 16-year-old in 1977, she finished fifth in the match sprints at the World Cycling Championships after challenging the U.S. Cycling Federation, which had a policy against sending riders under 18 to the competition.

The next winter, she won a pair of bronze medals at the World Speed Skating Championships.

Paraskevin-Young continued speed skating until 1984, making the Olympic team as an alternate in 1980 and finishing 13th in the 500-meter event in 1984.

By that time, she was a three-time world sprint champion in cycling, having succeeded her training partner and future sister-in-law, Sheila Young-Ochowicz, as champion in 1982.

Paraskevin-Young credits her husband, a former Olympic cyclist, with aiding in her emergence. In 1981, she had been eliminated early in the competition at the World Championships.

Young, whom she started dating in 1981 and married two years ago, taught her racing strategy.

“Before, I’d just try to overpower everybody,” she said.

In recent years, though, Paraskevin-Young has been unable to regain the world title. She lost in the final in 1985 and lost in the semifinals the last two years.

She disputes the assumption, however, that the competition has left her behind.

“When I won, all three (finals) went to three rides and all had photo finishes,” she said.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you dominated for three years, and then you lost.’ I didn’t dominate. I happened to win.”

And, in the last three years, she has happened to lose.

She grew bored with the lack of U.S. competition the year after she had won her third world championship. Many potentially strong women sprinters had taken to the road, she said, because a road race was the only cycling event for women at the 1984 Olympics.

There was such a dearth of talent among the women, in fact, that Paraskevin-Young again challenged the U.S. Cycling Federation, petitioning to compete against the men at the U.S. championships.

“I had no intention of making it a man-versus-woman thing,” she said. “I just wanted good competition.”

Her request was turned down, she said, because the federation feared for her safety. Another rider had threatened to knock her down.

“It was sexist,” she said of the decision against her.

The lack of competition left her “race dull” for the 1985 World Championships, where she lost in the final to Nicloso.

“I was making mistakes in races and still winning, so I got very lackadaisical,” she said. “It was like I didn’t have a challenge. There was nothing to motivate me. By the time the World Championships came around, I was physically capable, I think, but mentally, I wasn’t. I was dull.”

She vowed that it would never happen again. It hasn’t, but Paraskevin-Young hasn’t won again, either.

In 1986, trying to compensate for strong winds at Colorado Springs, Colo., the 5-foot 3-inch, 115-pound Paraskevin-Young made a tactical mistake in the semifinals and lost.

Then came last year.

“I walked away from the World Championships just feeling so empty because I felt like I was physically prepared, and what happened just blew me away,” she said.

The intensity of the pain, and the realization that the end of her career was only an injury away, led to a reevaluation of her priorities.

She altered her diet, substituting juice for soft drinks, cutting down on her caffeine intake and generally eating foods with more nutritional value.

“I’m like anybody,” she said. “I tend to work so much on my outer body--I do all these workouts and I do weight training--that I didn’t pay any attention to what went on inside, to what I fueled myself with.

“It’s really just a conscious effort to put better gasoline into my system.”

She’ll probably need it in Seoul, where her major competition will come from Christa Rothenburger-Luding of East Germany, who won the world title in 1986, and Erika Salumiaee of the Soviet Union, who won it last year.

Rothenburger-Luding is also a former speed skater. She won an Olympic gold medal in the 1,000-meter event and a silver in the 500-meter this year at Calgary. She also won a gold medal in the 500-meter in 1984.

Paraskevin-Young hasn’t faced international competition this year, but last month she established an unofficial world record of 11.289 seconds in the 1,000-meter match sprint, of which only the last 200 meters are timed.

She has trained with men, including Mark Gorski, who won an Olympic gold medal for the United States in the match sprint in 1984, and Canadian sprint champion Curt Harnett.

Her goals for the Olympics, she said, are much higher than in 1984, when the former speed skater went to the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, hoping only to finish among the top 10.

“This is a whole new ballgame,” she said. “Realistically, I’m going in to win. My personal best is not just going to give me my own satisfaction. My personal best is going to get me a gold medal.”

Her neck permitting, of course.

“I’m not worried about that at all,” she said. “I’m not going to have any problems. I’ve done the physical preparation and I feel good.”

Roger Young said his wife is reluctant to talk about her injury because she doesn’t want anyone making excuses for her.

“If a wolf is hunting a rabbit and the wolf has a thorn in his paw, do you think he worries about it?” Young said. “He just goes for it. If he gets the rabbit, good. If he doesn’t, does he use the thorn as an excuse?”

So, pain or no pain, Paraskevin-Young continues her chase.