Kevin Young Is Healthy and Flying High : Mt. SAC Relays: Former UCLA hurdler wins 400-meter event in 48.71 seconds.

Telling his tales of injury, disappointment and renewal, the athlete was aware that his life story was taking on a soap opera quality--something like Young Doctor Young of General Hospital.

Kevin Young is not a doctor, although he has seen plenty of them in the past year. He is young, 24, and has been through plenty lately. But just now he’s back and healthy and welcoming the change to facing hurdles on the track again and not off.

Young won the 400-meter hurdles Sunday at the Mt. SAC Relays in 48.71 seconds, a nice starting place for the first outdoor meet of the season.

Young, who was born in Los Angeles and attended UCLA, said he feels as if he has experienced the full spectrum of emotions in the past few years, beginning with making the Olympic team in 1988.

Back then, things were going along swimmingly. Young finished third at the Olympic Trials in a time that is still his personal best, 47.94.

But so overwhelmed was Young at being on the Olympic team that he squandered his emotional energy just being in Seoul. When it came time to race, Young was empty. He finished fourth in a respectable time, but the whole experience was filed under the heading: “Disappointment.”

The next year was to be titled, “Redemption.” Young had an excellent season and finished 1989 ranked No. 1 in the world while still at a tender age. Anything seemed possible.

As so often happens in sport, a remarkable season was followed hard with mediocrity that is difficult to accept but easy to predict. Young fell to No. 6 in the world. He had a mediocre first half of the 1990 season and and an even worse second half because of an injury.

“I was warming up at UCLA, preparing to go to a meet in Sao Paulo (Brazil),” Young said. “I felt a twinge in my left hamstring but I didn’t think anything of it. I went to Brazil anyway and it got worse. I didn’t take time off and tried to work through it and it became chronic. Then, my other leg was compensating and I injured my right hamstring. By the end of the season I had two pulled hamstrings. It was a shock to me. I’ve never been hurt like that.”

Young said that through it all he learned not to take his health for granted. He also came to see that, compressed into three years, he experienced a lifetime of emotions.

“It seemed like I touched on every different thing,” he said.

All of which has caused Young to talk incessantly about remaining healthy. It’s his goal for the season. That, and making the U.S. team that will go to the World Championships September at Tokyo . . . and breaking 47 seconds in the 400 hurdles.

The world record of 47.02 was set by Edwin Moses in 1983, and is as sound a record the sport has. But Young, a healthy Young, thinks that the next generation of hurdlers can break the 47-second barrier.

“The key is to stay healthy,” Young said, his soap opera stories happily behind him.

Young’s was not the meet’s only outstanding performance. The conditions at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut were not ideal for sprinting--cold, windy and damp--but nevertheless sprinters had excellent showings.

Most notable was Michael Johnson, who anchored the Mazda Track Club to a victory in the 800-meter relay. Mazda’s winning time was 1:21.50.

Johnson’s split was 19.2, a spectacular showing for this early in the season.

Mazda was pitted against the sprinting corps of Santa Monica Track Club--a team whose relay rejects would be welcome on most national teams.

Santa Monica’s team consisted of Joe DeLoach, Floyd Heard, Carl Lewis and Brian Cooper. Running for Mazda was Raymond Stewart, Dennis Mitchell, Keith Mouton and Johnson.

Mazda had the lead after the first leg but Heard ran a sparkling 200 split, timed in 19.6, to give Santa Monica the lead and bring the sparse crowd of 6,621 to life.

Lewis, running third, lengthened his team’s lead, running a 20.6 split. Lewis gave Cooper a five-meter lead to work with, but Johnson made short work of that.

Johnson showed why he was named Track and Field News’ international athlete of the year last season. He blew past Cooper with such velocity that Cooper would have done well to simply slide into Johnson’s slipstream and float to the finish.

How interesting it would have been to have seen Lewis run Santa Monica’s anchor leg against Johnson.

Newly crowned 400-meter indoor world champion Diane Dixon was busy. She won the 200 in 22.98 and anchored the winning 1,600-meter relay team. Her split time, splits being the stat of the day, was 44.5.

Local college performers did well. Quincy Watts of USC won the 400 in 45.78. Janeene Vickers of UCLA won the women’s invitation 100 meters in a wind-aided 11.41 and Inger Miller of USC won the women’s open 100 in 11.52. Mike Marsh of Santa Monica Track Club won the men’s 100 in a wind-aided time of 10.00

Ken Flax won the hammer throw with 249 feet 6 inches.

Dean Starkey won the pole vault with 18-8 3/4, a personal best which he cleared on his final attempt.

Starkey then missed three attempts at 19-0 3/4.

In the men’s discus, Mike Buncic won with a throw of 217-4. Wolfgang Schmidt, the former world record holder from Germany, was fourth with a throw of 200-3.