World champion athlete Candy Young brings Cold War sports journey home to Pennsylvania
This story was updated at 11:57 a.m., Sept. 28 to reflect the fact that after Candy Young’s championship in Moscow, her team had lost five pounds per athlete. A previous version of this story said that after Candy Young’s championship in Moscow, her team had lost five “points” per athlete.
CRANBERRY TWP — A record-setting hurdler and native Pennsylvanian has returned full circle since first crossing the Iron Curtain.
Candy Young, 60, formerly of Beaver Falls, spoke before the Rotary Club of Cranberry Township on Tuesday, Sept. 27 at the Rose E. Schneider Family YMCA. She described her achievement of multiple youth records, her junior athlete tournaments in Moscow and Berlin, and her hopes for the United States’ future.
At age 15, she said, she won the chance to compete as part of an international junior championship between the U.S., the Soviet Union and other nations held in 1977.
“After many hours of flying, we landed in Moscow. We exited the plane, surrounded by military forces with high-powered weapons. I had never seen a machine gun in my life. Now I’m surrounded by 30 men in uniforms, with machine guns, and they are pointing, with their backs to us, pointing away from us. We were told this was to protect us while we were in this country. I immediately thought this is nothing like my ‘America the Beautiful’ and the freedoms that I have at home.”
She prides herself on her unique role as an ambassador of United States culture.
In Moscow, this duty meant squaring off against living conditions designed to hamper their performance — hard beds, bug-infested food, poor sanitation. By the end of her time in Moscow, her team had lost five points per each athlete, Young said.
And yet, her team won the championship, despite those cruel tricks. On July 4, 1977, Young’s U.S. team defeated the Soviet Union on its own turf, in the face of jeers from the Russian stadium each time the U.S. anthem played.
“The anthem of a winning athlete is always performed on the podium during the Olympic Games,” Young said. “It’s played in recognition of your accomplishments and honoring that particular country. This act ties the individual to the unity of their homeland, because the USA athletes were dominating the event. I would pause and sing on the podium and think how fortunate I was to be a part of ‘America, the Beautiful.’ ”
That intersection of sports with national identity took a sharp turn in 1980, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the U.S. boycotted the Olympic Games in protest. Though Young had qualified for the U.S. Olympic team, Young would not get her chance to compete.
Young retained other honors, including recognition by Sports Illustrated as one of the top minor athletes of her time, a Congressional Gold Medal and invitations to attend lunch with her family at the White House.
She said that in recent years the sublime joy of those experiences has come in conflict with a decay within America. Gun violence, the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, pervasive substance abuse and division all threaten to corrupt what the country can be.
“I believe in hope, and a future with an expected end of immorality,” she said. “It starts today with each of us, seeking our beautiful America. It’s still there within us, next to our consciousness and our souls.”
