Taylor made

• Albany native Angelo Taylor’s late addition to the U.S. men’s 4x400-meter relay team pays off Saturday morning when Taylor helps lead the Americans to one of their few track & field gold medals of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

Staff Reports

BEIJING — Even Angelo Taylor wasn’t sure if his trip to the 2008 Summer Olympics would produce anything other than the chance to compete.

Little did he know, he’d be coming home from China with two gold medals.

Taylor, an Albany native and former Georgia Tech track star who now lives in Atlanta, came away with his second gold of the 2008 Summer Olympics as he helped the U.S. men’s 4x400-meter relay team smoke the field early Saturday, as Taylor, LaShawn Merritt, Jeremy Wariner and David Neville broke the Olympic record with a time of 2:55.39.

The U.S. has long dominated this relay and that only continued Saturday as the Americans set the previous record (2:55.74) in 1992.

“We wanted to uplift the track team,” Taylor told The Associated Press.

Turns out, Taylor’s presence was more important than most realize.

Already the 400-meter hurdle Olympic gold-medal winner, Taylor was not originally schedule to run on the 4x400-meter team, but was added as a late replacement once he showed U.S. men’s track coach Bubba Thornton he was running as good as any American at these Games.

“I thought it was a great performance,” Thornton said

The Bahamas was second (2:58.03), followed by Russia (2:58.06). Last week, Taylor won gold in the 400 hurdles — an event he also won in the 2000 Summer Games — with a time of 47.25 seconds.

Taylor also won gold as part of the men’s relay team in Sydney in 2004, but when teammate Antonio Pettigrew admitted last month he doped, the entire team was stripped of that medal. To this day, Taylor and teammate Michael Johnson are the only two from that team who have remained shining stars in an ugly doping era.

Saturday’s event, which was not broadcast live on U.S. TV, was shown on Saturday night to Albany viewers.

In addition to padding the medal count, the relay win made up for the gaffes two nights earlier, when both U.S. 400-meter teams dropped the baton and were disqualified in the semifinals.

This time, instead of being red-faced, the relay quartets were wearing red — special uniforms to replace the blue ones used throughout the first eight days of track and field competition.

Aiming to make amends, U.S. women’s coach Jeanette Bolden and Thornton held meetings with their relay squads before Saturday’s races and pulled out the red outfits. Thornton joked that he bought them at Beijing’s tourist-trap Silk Market.

“A lot of things happened in this Olympics that we weren’t expecting,” said Wariner, the 2004 Olympic champion in the 400 who got silver this time. “But we’ll use that to build on. I know next year at the world championships it’s going to be different.”

As for the women, it was a day of redemption for American Sanya Richards and Allyson Felix.

They had their dold. Their elusive gold.

Producing precisely the type of superb runs they couldn’t muster in their individual events, Felix and Richards helped deliver one of two U.S. victories in the 1,600-meter relays Saturday night, allowing a team that failed to live up to its own expectations a chance to celebrate.

“We had ups and we had downs. Just wanted to end on a high moment,” said Felix, who ran a strong second leg before anchor Richards had to overtake Russia’s Anastasia Kapachinskaya down the stretch. “It doesn’t make up for it, but it’s a start to the healing process.”

Entering the final track and field event, the men’s marathon Sunday, the U.S. leads with 23 medals at the Bird’s Nest, five more than Russia, and seven golds, one ahead of Russia and Jamaica.

Tyson Gay (100, 200), Reese Hoffa (shot put), Brad Walker (pole vault) and Bernard Lagat (1,500, 5,000) all are reigning world champions. None won so much as a bronze in Beijing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report