By Justin HAGER

With the Tokyo Olympics just weeks away, several area residents are gearing up for competition on the world’s biggest stage. Southern California is home to dozens of Olympic athletes, with several having particularly close ties to the local community and local high school and college sports culture. The CV Weekly is proud to feature a few of these local athletes and will be cheering them on when they compete in Tokyo at the end of the month.

The last time athletes gathered to compete for Olympic glory, La Cañada High School graduate Colin Morikawa had just completed his freshman year at University of California, Berkeley and was raising eyebrows in the golfing world as the winner of the Sunnehanna Amateur Tournament. Now the former CIF player of the year is preparing to travel to Tokyo as one of the favorites to win Olympic gold. Despite being the youngest male on the U.S. Olympic Golf team, the 24-year-old is ranked No. 4 in the world and is coming off impressive victories in the 2020 PGA Championship and the 2021 WGC-Workaday Championship, both of which he won by multiple strokes.

Playing the same courses as Morikawa will be a more recent rising star in local sports. Born in Arcadia, Rose Zhang just turned 18 years old in May, but the incoming Stanford University freshman is already the No. 1 rated amateur golfer in the world and is no stranger to the global stage. She was on the winning U.S. mixed-gender team at the 2019 Pan-American Games and led the U.S. to championships at both the 2017 and 2019 Junior Solheim Cup and Junior Ryder Cup.

More than her accomplishments, however, is her personality as a soft-spoken, humble, honest and infectiously optimistic young woman who will almost assuredly make her a fan favorite in Tokyo.

Of course, for some athletes optimism isn’t optional, it’s essential. Swimmer Jamal Hill, who lives in Los Angeles and trains at the Boys and Girls Club in Pasadena, was only 10 years old when he experienced total paralysis and doctors considered amputating his right arm. He was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT), a hereditary neurological condition that can result in progressive loss of muscle tissue and touch sensation in the body. Today, the 26-year-old U.S. Paralympian is ranked No. 3 in the world Paralympic 50 Free. While the world’s eyes will be on his pursuit of gold in Tokyo, his eyes are set closer to home where, here in the U.S., Hill founded Swim Up Hill, an organization dedicated to empowering Black and Brown youth locally and globally and teaching one million people to swim.

Another U.S. Paralympian with Pasadena ties is track star Breanna Clark. A 2014 graduate of Pasadena City College, Clark has already secured her first Gold, claiming the medal and falling just one one-hundredth (.01) seconds short of a world record in the 400-meter dash at the Rio 2016 games. The daughter of 1976 Olympic Silver-medalist and now LAPD officer and Police Academy instructor Rosalyn Clark, Clark broke the world record one year later, at the 2017 World Championships in London. Then in 2018, she broke her own record again, winning the Paralympic National Championships in Tempe, Arizona.

Unfortunately for Team USA, the region’s brightest softball star won’t be playing for Team USA. Crescenta Valley High School graduate Desiree “Dee Dee” Hernandez, the two-time Pacific League Pitcher of the Year who was recently named to 2021 All-CIF Southern Section softball team, is the youngest player on the Team Mexico roster and is considered by many to be the lynchpin of Mexico’s dreams of taking home a softball medal from Tokyo. Already a veteran in international competition, Hernandez played with the Mexican National team at 15 years old at the 2017 World Cup of Softball in Irvine and again at the World Baseball Championship in Japan and the Games. She’ll be returning to the U.S. in the fall to play with the San Diego State Aztecs.

While the CV Weekly will be cheering for team USA throughout the Olympics, there would be something particularly special about a Gold Medal match-up between the Stars and Stripes and the CVHS Falcons’ very own star on the mound.

If you know of other Olympians with ties to Crescenta Valley or our surrounding communities who weren’t mentioned in this article, send us a note on our website at www.cvweekly.com.