His Failure to Make Olympics Motivates Cyclist Gorski

His inability to reach the Seoul Olympics last year has fueled the determination of American cyclist Mark Gorski, who won a gold medal in the match sprints at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.

“Not making the (Olympic) team was very, very disappointing, but I came out of it very motivated,” Gorski said Thursday night at the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where he won a first-round heat in the Sundance Grand Prix of Cycling. “I was so close.”

Gorski, 29, lost at the U.S. Olympic trials to Ken Carpenter of La Mesa, Calif., his often bitter rival. Making his defeat all the more difficult to take, he said, was Carpenter’s early departure from the competition at Seoul.

“That was a frustrating thing,” Gorski said. “I just felt that I could have represented our country a heck of a lot better. Ken is young and inexperienced, and there’s a hell of a lot of pressure at the Olympics. You have to know how to deal with it in the right way.

“I really felt that if I’d been in Seoul, I would have done something. I think I would have been in the top four or five.”

But when he came up second at the trials, Gorski stayed home.

His preparation for the 1992 Barcelona Games, he said, started the day after he lost to Carpenter at Houston.

His goal this year is to qualify for the world championships, which will be contested in August at Lyon, France.

“I’m trying to pace myself emotionally so I can go for four more years,” he said. “If I didn’t feel I could still win, I wouldn’t do it.”

In Thursday night’s finals:

--Janie Eickhoff of Los Alamitos won the women’s miss and out, a race of attrition in which the last rider across the line at the end of each lap is eliminated from the race. When three riders remain, they are given a free lap before sprinting to the finish.

Eickhoff, 18, out-sprinted Madonna Harris of Park City, Utah, and Lucy Tyler of Largo, Fla., for the win.

--Erin Hartwell of Indianapolis won the men’s one-kilometer time trial, a race against the clock in which he posted a time of 1 minute 8.9 seconds.

Racing tonight starts at 7.