A Link Between Past, Present : Olympic Festival: Decathletes Dan O’Brien and Rafer Johnson discover common ground while fielding questions.

You can’t blame Dan O’Brien or Rafer Johnson for being bothered by some of the questions they’re being asked at the U.S. Olympic Festival.

After all, they are two of the United States’ most honored athletes.

O’Brien is the world-record holder in the decathlon and, a generation ago, America beamed as Johnson won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1960 Olympic Games, making him only the fourth U.S. Olympic decathlon champion since the modern Games started in 1896.

Linked by an event that labels its champion the “World’s Greatest Athlete,” they are also two of the most visible stars at the 1995 Festival.

O’Brien is here to do some fine tuning before the World Championships in Sweden next month. Johnson is here to watch his daughter Jennifer, who earned a bronze medal with the volleyball team, and attend a ceremony at which he was named one of 100 Olympic alumni to be honored at the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics at Atlanta in 1996.

And because the media contingent here is large, both O’Brien and Johnson are repeatedly asked, “What if?”

For O’Brien, it is fairly understandable. He was a favorite to win the gold medal in the 1992 Olympics but didn’t make the U.S. team when he failed to clear 15 feet 9 inches on three attempts in the pole vault after passing at lower heights: What if he had made that pole vault?

For Johnson, it borders on the ludicrous, but the question persists: What if he had trained like today’s athletes?

It may be a mere nuisance to Johnson--he asked the U.S. Olympic Committee to limit the media’s opportunities to interview him so he wouldn’t overshadow his daughter--but for O’Brien it is even worse.

Rafer Johnson finds the comparisons to be academic at best.

“No, I’m not bothered at all,” he said. “I took my turn and I did the best I could do at the time. I don’t think you can compare Dan O’Brien and me because it was a different time. I was seasonal. Dan runs year round. Cross-generational comparisons become difficult because of that. I would play football in football season, and in track season I prepared for track. In my time, that’s what we did.”

Johnson smiled at that thought.

“I guess nowadays you could call it cross-training,” he added.

Unfortunately for Johnson’s bank account, shoe company marketing didn’t catch on to that idea until the 1980s.

O’Brien said decathletes “do specialize more these days, so it’s hard to compare. But I think the level of the athlete is pretty consistent. You have to be very versatile, as they were back then.”

Johnson pointed out another major difference: “There wasn’t the whole commercial aspect of things, but it’s much different today than it was. I’m not knocking today, I think it’s a great way to go. Now you have this whole corporate thing where the athletes can spend all their time training, and I think that’s good.

“I mean, when I started, kids got kicked off the team for lifting weights.”

O’Brien agreed.

“I think the training is very different as well. I don’t think they trained as intensely, and they didn’t know as much about training.”

And if anyone has learned the lessons of training properly, it’s O’Brien.

He has had his share of trials and tribulations.

Especially trials--as in the U.S. Olympic trials at New Orleans on June 27, 1992.

O’Brien was on a world-record pace after seven events. He had easily cleared 15-9 many times in the past but couldn’t manage it this time and wound up without a point in the pole vault. It turned out that a vault of 9-2 1/4 would have been enough for him to have finished third in the trials and thereby make the Olympic team.

He finished 11th in the competition, so his only ticket to the Games in Barcelona came with a commentator’s microphone.

“I’ll tell you one thing, I can do the pole vault in any condition now, whether it’s raining or anything,” O’Brien said.

“I grew as a person after that. I realized that no matter how hard you’ve trained or how hard you’ve practiced, something can go wrong. Nothing is for sure. I had to readjust my goals and my thinking. I had to look at the long term. For a couple of years before that, I was just thinking Barcelona and nothing else.

“It opened my eyes and made me realize that there’s more out there--there’s more years to go--there’s more to my life than just track and field.”

And in knowing that, there’s no question that Rafer Johnson and Dan O’Brien have a lasting link.

Olympic Festival Notes

O’Brien vaulted 16 feet 4 3/4 inches at Thursday’s track meet, which would have put him eighth out of nine had he been participating for one of the regional teams. “I went so high on the first one I thought I would have a great day. The track was unbelievably fast so after going straight up on my first one, I started going through [the bar]. I needed stronger poles. When it’s this hot [90 degrees], your poles can really bend,” O’Brien said. He also threw the discus 164 feet 1 inch. He will be in the 1,600-meter relay Sunday and long jump today. . . . Carl Lewis will also be in the long jump. . . . Mike Conley had the best triple-jump of the day on his last try with a jump of 55- 3/4. . . . Al Joyner, 35, finished last (49-9) in the event. “Today was probably the worst feeling in the world--going from Olympic champion to doing so poorly I’ll redeem myself next year,” Joyner said.