1. Yang Chuan-kwang played baseball at the Taitung Agricultural School and was coached by former Kano baseball team player Chen Keng-yuan in the 1940s.
14 Facts About Yang Chuan-kwang
1. 2.
Yang Chuan-kwang's most memorable decathlon competition was a decathlon duel with Rafer Johnson, his friend and teammate at the University of California at Los Angeles, during the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.
3.
Johnson ran his personal best at 4:49.7 and finished just 1.2 sec slower than Yang Chuan-kwang, winning the gold by 58 points with an Olympic record total of 8,392 points.
4.
Yang Chuan-kwang was the first Olympic medallist in his country's history.
5.
Yang Chuan-kwang had confessed to fellow Olympian Chen An-hu before his death that he had purposely slowed down so Johnson, who would eventually be too old to compete, could win the gold medal; Yang Chuan-kwang won the silver medal.
6.
Yang Chuan-kwang was the first man to break the 9,000 barrier under the old scale.
7.
Yang Chuan-kwang placed fifth in the decathlon at the 1964 Summer Olympics.
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Rafer Johnson 8.
Yang Chuan-kwang attributed his failure to Ma Chen-shan poisoning him with a drink; Ma would defect to China after the event.
9.
Yang Chuan-kwang appeared in a number of films, including Walk, Don't Run, as well as the 1970 western There Was a Crooked Man.
10.
Yang Chuan-kwang served in the Legislative Yuan from 1983 to 1986 as a member of the Kuomintang representing what became the Lowland Aborigine Constituency.
11.
Yang Chuan-kwang was a member of the Amis, one of the sixteen officially recognized peoples of Taiwanese aborigines.
12.
In 2001, while serving as president of the National Sports Training Center at Kaohsiung, Yang Chuan-kwang was diagnosed with liver cancer.
13.
Yang Chuan-kwang died on January 27,2007, from a massive stroke.
14.
Yang Chuan-kwang is buried at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura, California.