Early Athletic Career
Ken Patera was genetically predisposed towards Olympic lifting from the start: he was strong and extraordinarily athletic. His brother Jack Patera played football for the Baltimore Colts and was the head coach for the Seattle Seahawks from 1976 until 1982. Ken played football at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon and wrestled weighing at 193 pounds. However, Track and Field was his first love and he ran the high hurdles and high jumped, but a serious ankle injury forced him to switch to the shot put and discus in high school. Ken grew to become one of the nation’s premier track and field weight throwers. Ken attended Brigham Young University on a scholarship and won a gold medal in the shot-put at the Pan American Games in 1967. After his disappointing 6th place finish in the shot-put at the 1968 Olympic trials, he turned his full and complete attention towards Olympic weightlifting.
Read more about this topic: Ken Patera
Famous quotes containing the words early, athletic and/or career:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)