Her Olympic Dream Now a Morning Glory

Dreams can come true.

Just ask heptathlete Sharon Hanson-Lowery of Fairfax Station, Va.

The 1983 graduate of Buena High didn’t win a Southern Section--let alone a state--title in high school. Nor did she win any NCAA Division II championships at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

But Hanson-Lowery never stopped dreaming about competing in the Olympic Games. That fantasy will become reality Saturday morning when she runs in a heat of the heptathlon 100-meter high hurdles in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium.

“I can remember thinking about competing in the Olympic Games back when I was a kid,” said Hanson-Lowery, 30. “There would be times in workouts when I’d be really tired and I’d tell myself that if you ever want to get to the Games, you can’t give up.”

Nonetheless, as she approached the 1988 Olympic trials, the 5-foot-6 1/2, 140-pound Hanson-Lowery had retirement on her mind.

She was primarily a hurdler with career bests of 13.75 seconds in the 100 highs and 56.79 in the 400 lows at that point. But after totaling 5,537 points to finish 10th in the heptathlon in the trials, she began to take the event seriously.

She became hooked in 1989 as she improved her best to 5,983 points and finished third in the national championships and second in the Olympic Festival.

“I knew then that the heptathlon was what I wanted do do,” she said. “After the Olympic Festival, I remember thinking, ‘Hey. This is something I can do.’ ”

Hanson-Lowery was ranked fourth in the U.S. in 1990 and ’91 after upping her best to 6,030 and 6,123 points, respectively, but she dropped to sixth in ’92 after totaling 6,078 to finish fifth in the Olympic trials.

She sat out the 1993 season with injuries and barely topped 6,000 points in ’94 before finishing fifth in the national championships last year with a career best of 6,202.

That set the stage for the June trials in Atlanta, where Hanson-Lowery notched career bests in four of the seven events to total 6,352 points and finish third behind Kelly Blair (6,406) and two-time defending Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee (6,403).

Although Hanson-Lowery’s total puts her in a tie for 10th on the yearly world list and is 590 points behind 1995 world champion Ghada Shouaa of Syria (6,942), she figures she can contend for a medal.

“I don’t want to put any limits on myself,” she said. “I just want to do the very best that I possibly can. It would be easy to say that this woman and that woman have scored 6,700 points and I can’t do that, but who’s to say that they’ll do that in the Games? Anything can happen in the Olympics, especially in the heptathlon.”

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Hanson-Lowery was awarded a whopping 1,114 points in the 100 hurdles when she ran 13.07 in the trials and that performance has rekindled her interest in training for the event full-time.

Although she has no intention of retiring from the heptathlon, Hanson-Lowery has thought about focusing on the hurdles in 1997 and ’98 to see how much she can improve.

“I’m curious to see what would happen if I just concentrated on one event,” she said.

Hanson-Lowery’s 13.07 clocking in the heptathlon would have placed her fifth in one semifinal of the 100 hurdles at the trials and sixth in the other.

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Regina Jacobs of Oakland, Dave Stephens of Herndon, Va., Ruben Benitez of Los Angeles and Nada Kawar of UCLA and La Crescenta are four other athletes with high school or college ties to the region who will compete in the Olympic track competition which starts Friday.

Jacobs, a 1981 graduate of what is now Campbell Hall High, is making her third appearance in the Games in the 1,500.

Stephens, the 1984 NCAA Division II champion for Cal State Northridge in the javelin,placed 14th in the 1988 Games at Seoul.

Benitez, runner-up in the 400 for Taft High in the 1990 City Section finals, will represent his native El Salvador in the 100 and 200.

Kawar, fifth in the shotput for Crescenta Valley High in the 1993 State championships, will compete in that event and in the discus for her native Jordan.