READY FOR THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES : Connie Paraskevin-Young, 35 : Cyclist Getting Better With Age Approaching Her Fifth Trip to Games

Connie Paraskevin-Young will see them in the Olympic Village with their stuffed animals and hair ribbons and girlish things, and she will know as she looks at them what they will not know until later.

That to be so strong and still so young, so tested by competition and so untested by life--that is something no number of Olympic teams or medals will ever let them recapture.

“What they don’t know and don’t realize--that’s exactly what is most beneficial to them,” said Paraskevin-Young, a cyclist and former speedskater who is back for her fifth and final Olympics at 35. “They’re just there to enjoy, do what they do, compete in the Olympics. They’re on a high, they’re performing. That’s a great feeling. And as much as they don’t know it then, it will be the best feeling they’ll ever have.

“As you get older, you take on more responsibilities that are not sports, but personal. It becomes a big puzzle you try to juggle. Never again will you have your sole focus as competition. To have that back again, I’d give anything.”

Paraskevin-Young was 18 when she made her first Olympic team as a speedskater in the 1980 Winter Games. She returned in ‘84, then switched to track cycling and won a bronze medal in Seoul in ’88 and went to Barcelona in ’92. She made her final Olympic team last month by beating 21-year-old Christine Witty in the finals of the match sprint at Trexlertown, Pa., breaking her own 10-year-old track record in the process.

“This is definitely my last Olympics, that’s for sure,” said Paraskevin-Young, whose home base is in Corona del Mar. “That in and of itself is kind of a shocker.”

After a disappointing trip to Barcelona, where she was disqualified from a crucial race by a judge’s decision and failed to advance, Paraskevin-Young considered retiring, taking six months off.

“Maybe I’d get on the bike to go down to the beach,” she said. “Literally, in my life, I’d never taken six months off.”

But by the time a year had passed, she was training for Atlanta and a last chance at gold.

“She likes to ride a bike, and competing in the Olympics is a goal you can get excited about,” said her husband and coach, Roger Young, whose sister is former Olympic speedskater and cyclist Sheila Young. “When you’ve been an Olympic athlete, and you’re saying, ‘I’d like to still ride, I’d like to still compete,’ the only goal there really is, is another Olympics.

“In her heart, and in my heart, I knew she could still improve from ’92. It’s like when you get off the phone with someone and you’re saying, ‘God, I should have said this or that.’ After a lot of races, you get done and you’re thinking, ‘We should have tried this or we should have tried that.’ After ‘92, there were still things that were yet untried.”

The disqualification in Barcelona--a judge ruled her back wheel left the sprint lane and obstructed a French rider--tested Paraskevin-Young’s will to race.

“I trained for the Games, I competed, but I really felt I got cheated by the officials’ call,” Paraskevin-Young said. “My mind was telling me I didn’t finish something I started. I didn’t feel completed.

“I had a lot of disappointment, questioning how things in our sport change. One thing I always liked was it was athlete-determined, not determined by judges. But then there were so many official rulings, it seemed every time you raced there were different types of calls.

“I thought, ‘Man, you train for four years and give 100 percent, and then my finish is in the hands of someone else.’ I thought, ‘No, I don’t need to do that, I’m not 16 years old anymore.’ There are other things I want to do with the rest of my life. Maybe it was time to move on.”

It wasn’t, she knows now. Instead, incredibly, she seems to be at her peak at an age when women athletes--particularly women in sprint events--are presumed to be finished or close to it.

Roger Young disputes that, saying women can remain competitive even in non-endurance events.

“I have a textbook that shows degradation versus age in performance, but it’s based on cultures,” he said. “In the 1960s, women weren’t competing in their 30s and 40s. It’s far more acceptable in the ‘80s and ‘90s to be highly competitive at 30 or 40, especially for women. The idea of a woman performer tapering off at 30 or 40 was based on a culture that considered it a novelty for a girl to run cross-country. There’s every reason to believe you can get better and better.

“Physically, you can stay as fast as ever. And your ability to play the game improves. Then there’s a third thing, skills. She handles and steers a bike better than anyone on the track. It’s interesting to watch. I’ve seen her defeat opponents on superior tactics, superior skills and superior strength.”

Strategy and skill are of supreme importance in the match sprint, the cat-and-mouse game of track cycling. It is the race that doesn’t seem to be a race until the final 200 meters, an all-out sprint to the finish. The first 800 are spent merely positioning, with each rider trying to force the other to take a lead to allow drafting, sometimes nearly falling over as they slow their brakeless bikes to a near halt.

“To win in the Olympic Games, tactics, skill and power have to come together at the same time,” Young said. “I can see her coming to a peak as we get closer to Atlanta.”

As the years have passed, Paraskevin-Young and her husband have honed her training techniques and increasingly turning to high-technology aids.

It began years ago with heart-rate monitors, once used by only elite athletes, now common among the StairMaster set.

Today’s tools include a blood-lactate analyzer, something akin to the portable blood-sugar testers used by diabetics. A prick of the finger in the minutes immediately after a workout, and Paraskevin-Young can get a reading on her level of exertion.

“It helps you know how much to do, at what level you’re doing it, whether you need to do more, or if you should not do more,” she said.

Another analytical tool is a computer program that takes information from a microchip placed on the crank of her bike. A removable box on the handlebar reads cadence, revolutions per minute, distance, time, and power output per stroke.

What separates it from ordinary handlebar computers is that the box is then plugged into a home computer, which spits out various graphs and analysis of the information.

“I can look at what I did, or use it to do something in a specific way, work on a very specific cadence, or work on the power of my pedal stroke,” she said.

Experience has helped her, but Paraskevin-Young admits her “experienced” physique now requires more care.

“Because I am older, there are benefits to that, and there are drawbacks,” she said. “Getting injured, it takes longer to recover. If you’re not careful, with sloppy training you’ll get injured more easily.”

She has struggled, though, with illnesses--frequent, unexplained and persistent colds.

“I was saying, ‘Roger, every time you get a cold, you get it for two days and I get it for two weeks. Stay away from me.’

“Every time I’d get myself going, and say, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m ready to go on to the next phase,’ boom. Sometimes I’d be down five days, in bed. It’s very much like a flu--total body ache, nausea. As smart as I like to think I am, it takes a while sometimes to say, ‘Hey, this is happening too much, it’s too regular.’ I went to the doctor and said, ‘I can’t afford to be sick for two weeks.’ ”

She was recently diagnosed with sinus disease--something an operation could cure, though she no longer had enough time before the Olympics to have one.

“I’m crossing my fingers I don’t get another cold,” she said. “At this point I can’t do anything except treat the symptoms.”

It adds suspense, anyway.

“There have been new challenges the past few years, and challenges keep your interest,” Paraskevin-Young said. “If it was easy, I don’t think I’d still be here. I’m the type of person, unless you have to work, I say, ‘Ah, it’s too easy. Let’s find something else.’ As much as you’d like everything to go perfect, I really think I perform better when it hasn’t.

“Going to Barcelona, things were almost perfect. It was too good to be true, right up until I didn’t do well. Hopefully I’ve turned my luck around. I’ve had to overcome some things.”

From Lake Placid to Sarajevo to Seoul to Barcelona and Atlanta, “each one has its own focus,” Paraskevin-Young said. “I think for a lot of different reasons, I appreciate each one more. I think if I try to pinpoint why, as you go through a career you go through more and more. You overcome very different things. Good things happen to you, and bad things happen to you. To be able to stretch yourself for so long a period of time. . . . I really appreciate that I’m here and I’m going to Atlanta, and in a position to do well. I didn’t know if that was going to be the case three years ago.

“But if I start thinking, ‘This is my last Olympics, my last race,’ I’ll run into trouble. As an athlete, I can’t do that. It’s really a double-edged sword. In one way, it’s sad. I’m ending part of my life. I’ve had a great career. I’ll be very sad to end my competitive days. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to the other things I’ll be able to do and take on.”

Starting a family is a priority, along with some cycling-related ventures. Paraskevin-Young and her husband are involved with a corporately sponsored program to create exposure for cycling with a traveling exhibit that tests abilities on computerized stationary bikes. She also talks about staging a cycling event at the beach in Southern California--something akin to beach volleyball but with a portable cycling track as the centerpiece.

And athletically, “one thing I’d like to do is something totally opposite,” she said. “Run a marathon. From 200 meters to 26 miles.”

“Talk to me after the Games. I could be totally bummed or totally happy. It will be a change in lifestyle. Like I said, there will be different options.

“I learned I have to take what happened in Barcelona and learn from it, but I can’t dwell on it. Whether it’s thinking about what happened in ’92 or it being my last Olympics or last night’s dinner, the way athletes perform best is to focus. When you can hit that zone and you’re in that performance state, that’s as good as gold.

“It’s rare, and in my whole career, it’s only happened a handful of times.”

Once more is all she asks.

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Connie Paraskevin-Young at a Glance

Age: 35

Residence: Corona del Mar

Sport: Track Cycling

Height: 5 feet 3

Weight: 120 pounds

Olympic Events: 1,000-meter match sprint.

Olympic Experience: 1980, ’84 Winter Games (Speedskating). 1988, ‘92, ’96 Summer Games (Cycling).

International Experience: 1988 Seoul Games bronze medalist. Four-time world champion.