Sports

London Games: South Hills Race Walker Competes Saturday

You can watch Trevor Barron, of Bethel Park, compete for the gold in the Olympic 20-kilometer race walk.

19-year-old , of Bethel Park, will compete for the gold in the Olympic 20-kilometer race walk Saturday in London.

Barron, a computer science major at Colorado College who recently completed his freshman year, won the U.S. Olympic trials' 20,000-meter race walk (50 laps around the Hayward Field track) in 1:23:00.10, setting three records in the process, according to armorytrack.com.

His 1:02:06.57 was an American record at 15,000 on the track, and the final 1:23.00.10 was both "an all-time Olympic trials best and an American best-ever, anywhere, on the track," the site reports.

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Barron was the only athlete in the event to earn a spot on the U.S. team.

Barron recently spoke with the Post-Gazette about his past struggles—he was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 8, and at 13, he had a serious surgery to correct the chronic neurological disorder seen most often through frequent seizures and was supposed to be free of further burden, the newspaper reports.

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He discovered race walking on a spring break trip to Texas to train with the country's only purely race walk team, the South Texas Walking Club, according to the P-G. 

His race is scheduled for 5 p.m. Saturday, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT); 12 p.m. Eastern Time. However, according to NBC Olympics listings, most of the race will be shown on MSNBC on a tape delay from 4:45 to 6 p.m. ET.

There is so much more to Barron's story.

Read the full P-G article here. Also, check out his interview—which includes video—with the Tribune-Review's Dejan Kovacevic here.

To watch the race walk live, you can visit nbcolympics.com in advance and complete the sign-up process. For more about Barron, visit trevorbarron.com.

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