Thorrington Has Family in Mind

HERSHEY, Pa. —  The spirit of the Olympics dies hard. The competitive flame stays lit no matter the obstacle. It can even leap from sport to sport and from generation to generation.

Consider, for instance, Peter Thorrington.

Several decades ago, he was a top-class 400-meter runner, good enough, apparently, to have competed in the Olympic Games. But politics intervened and he was not allowed the chance.

Consider, now, John Thorrington.

He is a top-class soccer player in the making, a 20-year-old from Palos Verdes who already has spent two seasons with Manchester United in England and one with Bayer Leverkusen in Germany.

Tonight, he and the rest of his U.S. teammates will play Canada, knowing that they are two victories away from qualifying for the soccer tournament of the Sydney Summer Games.

The fact that they are so tantalizingly close to achieving their goal is inspiration enough. For John Thorrington, however, there’s additional motivation.

“It would be a dream come true,” he said Monday. “On top of that, I have a big personal motivation. My dad should have been an Olympian, but South Africa was banned because of [its former racial segregation policy of] apartheid, so he wasn’t able to run in an Olympics. That was a big disappointment for him.

“So it [qualifying for Sydney] is a big thing for me, a sort of thank-you type thing. I know how much it would mean to him and my family.”

Thorrington didn’t start in the U.S. team’s opening game, against Honduras on Friday night, but Coach Clive Charles did bring him off the bench for the final 23 minutes.

That was enough time for the winger to set up one goal and score another, turning a shaky 1-0 U.S. lead into a convincing 3-0 victory and earning himself a starting place tonight against Canada.

“He’s done well,” Charles said. “He’s very direct, he’s very quick. He came on the other night and did what he does best. He likes to get by people.

“We like to attack, we want to get forward, and the pace of the game the other night was tremendous. It was a professionally played game and it suited him. The time was right for him to come on and get after people, and that’s what he did.”

John Thorrington was 2 when his family left South Africa and moved to California. He was 4 when he started playing in the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), and he steadily moved up through the ranks of various club teams.

“Ever since I was 4, it’s been what I’ve been best at,” he said. “I played baseball, a little bit of basketball, but soccer’s always been the one I was best at. I’m so competitive that I don’t like doing things if I’m not good at them.”

Eventually, Octavio Zambrano discovered him, and the former Galaxy and current New York/New Jersey MetroStar coach invited him to join an elite club team, the Mission Viejo Pateadores.

That presented a logistical problem, but Monique Thorrington, John’s mother, solved it.

“Before I had my [driving] license, my mom would drive down twice a week, two hours at least on the 405 [Freeway],” Thorrington said. “We’d leave at 5 o’clock, get there at 7 for training until 9 o’clock and then she’d drive back. And she would sit and wait. There weren’t top-level club teams in the [Palos Verdes] area, so I had to go elsewhere.

“I was only with him [Zambrano] for a short time, but he’s one person who has always believed in me and has always told me to believe in myself. He tried to get me into Major League Soccer when I was 17 and that was flattering to me as a junior in high school.”

While playing for the Pateadores, Thorrington was spotted by an Englishman, Steve Kelly, who had connections to Manchester United, and Kelly got Thorrington a trial at one of the world’s richest and most famous teams.

Manchester United liked what it saw and signed the youngster from Chadwick High to a professional contract. Having been offered several college scholarships, Thorrington had narrowed his choices down to UCLA and Stanford.

But Manchester United doesn’t come knocking at the door every day.

“At first, my parents’ idea was that I went to a good college on a scholarship,” Thorrington said. “It helped having my dad. He was a really serious athlete and he also knows how really serious soccer is in Europe, because he was born in England.

“They told me what they thought and then they left me to make my decision. After I made the decision, my dad told me he would have done the same thing.”

So Thorrington learned his craft in England, playing alongside the likes of such English, Norwegian, Dutch and Welsh internationals as Teddy Sherringham, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Jordi Cruyff and Ryan Giggs.

But former UCLA and now Galaxy Coach Sigi Schmid landed him anyway. Once Thorrington acquired U.S. citizenship last year, Schmid named him to the U.S. Under-20 team that competed in the FIFA World Youth Championship in Nigeria.

There, the U.S. winger was spotted by Bayer Leverkusen and the club that is poised to win this season’s German championship signed him to a lucrative five-year contract, including him with its two other players from California: Frankie Hejduk of Cardiff by the Sea and Landon Donovan of Redlands.

The Nigeria world championship was the start of Thorrington’s rise through the national team ranks. Now, he is challenging Ben Olsen for the starting job on the right wing for the Under-23 team.

Tonight, Olsen has moved over to the left, giving the U.S. a potent attack down both flanks.

“He’s great,” Olsen said Monday. “He’s a fantastic player. He’s been in this business a long time overseas and he’s seen a different type of soccer than a lot of these guys. It’s so nice to have a guy like that come in and do well. It’s great to be pushed.”

Olsen, 22, who is pushing the Galaxy’s Cobi Jones for the right wing spot on the full U.S. national team, has no problem playing on the left and said Thorrington can play there too.

“I can play on both and I have throughout the last couple of seasons,” the D.C. United player said. “He can do it as well. Wide midfielders can do both, for the most part, if they’re OK with both feet. A lot of times you see them switch. In the last game, I switched with him a couple of times.”

Thorrington is pleased to be on the same field as Olsen.

“We’re very different,” he said. “I’d say I’m more of a conventional winger and he’s more of a very busy midfielder, in my opinion. But I would love to have the success he’s had in the short time he’s been in MLS and with the national teams. He is a good person to see every day and to train with because he definitely has qualities that I would like to add to my game.”

Thorrington would like nothing more than to eventually play for the U.S. national team and take part in the 2006 World Cup, which has a good chance of being staged in South Africa.

That would bring the family full circle.

But first there are this week’s two games. There are a lot of dreams riding on both.

Peter Thorrington long ago gave up running laps and took up running a freight company. But if the U.S. wins tonight and again on Friday, the CEO will be taking a vacation come September.

A Thorrington will finally be in the Olympics.

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Olympic Qualifying Tournament

at Hershey, Pa.

* Today: Mexico vs. Panama (2:30 p.m.), United States vs. Canada (5 p.m.)

* Friday: Semifinals (2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.)

* Sunday: Third-place game (10 a.m.), Championship final (12:30 p.m.)

Olympic qualifying games will be broadcast online at www.internetsoccer.com