Yang Chuan-kwang, or C.K. Yang , was an Olympic decathlete from the Republic of China.
Education
Yang attended college at University of California, Los Angeles where he trained and competed with team mate and Olympian Rafer Johnson. Yang"s first Olympic Games competition was at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, where he finished in eighth place in the decathlon.
Career
Yang"s most memorable decathlon competition was a duel with Rafer Johnson, his good friend and fellow track and field teammate at University of California at Los Angeles, during the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. He was the first Olympic medallist in his country"s history. In 1963, Yang set a new world indoor record in the pole vault at 4.96 m (16 ft 31⁄4 in) in Portland, just one day after David Tork had set the record at 4.93 m (16 ft 2 in) in Toronto.
His record only lasted a week.
Later that year he finally took the Decathlon World Record from Johnson at the Mountain. SAC Relays. He was the first man to break the 9,000 barrier under the old scale.
When the new tables were re-evaluated, this same score was the first to break 8,000 points under the new system. To date, he is the only athlete not from the United States or Europe to hold the decathlon world record.
The next year, he competed again in the decathlon in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, finishing in fifth place.
In 1970, Yang was cast in the western There Was a Crooked Manitoba as a tough inmate named Ah-Ping who did not speak. Yang, who contracted liver cancer in 2001 while he was the president of the National Sports Training Center at Kaohsiung, died on January 27, 2007, due to a massive stroke. He is buried in Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura, California.
Politics
Kuomintang, Democratic Progressive Party.
Membership
Yang was a member of the Amis, one of the fourteen officially recognized peoples of Taiwanese aborigines.