Johnnye Valien vaults at the 2000 USATF National Masters Championships in Eugene, Oregon. Don Austin, officiating, looks on. He'd become the USA team manager at the 2001 WAVA world masters meet in Brisbane, Australia. 

Photo by Ken Stone

Published September 10, 1998

By Ken Stone

Johnnye Valien has trouble finding competition. If she can’t find it near her Los Angeles home, well, she’ll just have to travel.

In 1993, she flew to Miyazaki, Japan. In 1997, it was Durban, South Africa. This year, it was Orono, Maine, and Eugene, Ore. All to find someone to sprint, hurdle, jump and throw against.

When you’re 73, the biggest challenge is finding a challenger.

Valien is among 1,400 entrants expected at the 11th annual San Diego Senior Sports Festival, or Senior Olympics, a 21-sport banquet for athletes 50 and over. Opening ceremonies are tomorrow, and competition runs Saturday through Sept. 20.

A world age-group champion many times over, Valien will use the meet as a tuneup for an October Senior Olympics in Las Vegas, which serves as a qualifier for the 1999 National Senior Sports Classic in Orlando, Fla.

Her events Saturday at San Diego State?

“I’ll do the 100, 200, high jump, long jump, javelin and shot put,” she said yesterday from Los Angeles, where she lives with a daughter and grandson.

But not her favorite event -- the 80-meter hurdles. It’s not offered. (Note: Actually, it was. Meet put the event on for her beneifit.)

Valien can’t be too disappointed. After all, she waited more than 40 years to make her comeback.

Growing up in Houston, she says she spent a lot of time at a local recreation center. Her athletic appetite whetted, she attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the late 1940s as a P.E. major and swam and played basketball.

She ran a little track. But it wasn’t until 1948, when seven of her Tuskegee teammates competed in the London Olympic Games, that she was seriously inspired.

So “at the ripe old age of 22,” she says, she moved to Los Angeles -- and began looking for a track team.

She couldn’t find one. “They said I was too old.”

Dream deferred, Valien earned her master’s degree in recreation at UCLA and went to work for the city. She retired in 1987 as a senior recreation director.

Then on a visit back to Houston in 1990, she read a Chronicle story about a Senior Olympics there. She unretired as a track athlete.

The rest is world-record history. At 5-foot-4 and 119 pounds (“4 pounds overweight” from her college days), Valien has 21 medals in world championship competition -- in Japan; Buffalo, N.Y. (1995); and South Africa. She even holds age records in Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s event -- the two-day heptathlon.

She’s lost count of her world records, however, saying, “I've kind of fallen behind. In fact, I don’t own a record book.” She’s only three years away from being the oldest female hurdler on record.

But first things first: She’s dismayed at losing her age 70-74 pole vault record of 6-0 to Leonore McDaniels of Virginia, a kidlet at 70 who recently vaulted 7 feet at the Nike World Masters Games in Eugene.

Just means Valien will have to get more serious in her three-days-a-week training regimen, sometimes under the eye of UCLA vault coach Anthony Curran.

And there’s always the motivation of the 13th World Veterans Athletic Championships in August 1999, where she’ll enter at least seven events.

There she expects not to crumble against a trio of tough 70-plus cookies -- two from New Zealand and one from South Africa.

The meet’s only a hop, step and jump away -- in Gateshead, England.