BEIJING - Valerie Gotay arrived for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona two weeks before the judo competition began. She was 18 and weighed 118 pounds. She needed to weigh 106.

So she ran and worked out daily, and she watched what she ate. Her weight gradually came down, to 115, then 110, then 108, then 107.3 the night before the weigh-in for the 48-kilo, or 106-pound, division.

But her body was shutting down from the lethal combination of exercising in the torrid Barcelona heat and not drinking fluids because fluids, of course, only add weight. When she began staggering that night, unable to walk on her own, team staff took her to the infirmary. Doctors told her she needed intravenous fluids and she needed them immediately.

Gotay shook her head.

"They wanted to put two bags in and each bag weighed a kilo," says Gotay, who in 1992 went by her maiden name, Lafon. "I finally let them put one bag in, with the plan being that I would feel better in the morning and cut weight then."

The weigh-in was at 10 a.m. Her teammates woke her up at 5, dressed her in layer upon layer of clothes and took her to the track, running alongside her so she wouldn't fall. At 8, they took her to a sauna.

She had on a plastic suit to trap the heat and thick sweats over that. Ski socks. Mittens. A ski cap. A hooded sweatshirt.

"I thought I was going to die," Gotay says. "I tried to get out (of the sauna), but my teammates were holding me down. I finally stormed out with my last bit of strength, and I collapsed right there. I went into convulsions."

Her Olympics were over before they began. So was her career.

The next day Gotay was on a flight home that to this day she barely remembers. A few months later, after being in and out of the hospital and still fighting fatigue, she retired from competitive judo.

Gotay is talking about the barn behind her house in rural Temecula, Calif.

She's talking about it at Beijing Normal University, the base for the U.S. Olympic team at the 2008 Summer Olympics that open July 8. She is 34. She has two daughters. The U.S. judo team has just finished practicing.

The barn is what got Gotay back into judo, what rekindled an Olympic flame extinguished 16 years ago. The barn, and one of those wild-hair thoughts that can send life down unforeseen paths.

The barn originally was a tool shed when Gotay and her husband, Angel, an elementary school principal, bought the house. Wanting to get back in shape after the birth of her second child, Gotay transformed the barn into a workout room with weights and a treadmill.

"Then it was like, we could put some mats in the barn and it would be good for the girls," Gotay says. "They could run around in there and play all kinds of games. They could play indoor soccer in there. It would be fun for them."

That was 2003, and San Diego had just been named host of the 2004 U.S. Olympic Judo Trials. And Gotay got to thinking: Why not train for a couple of months and make a comeback in her hometown at age 30?

"It was a personal challenge, a dare," Gotay says. "I kind of challenged myself ... And no one was like, 'You're crazy.' They all said, 'You should do it.' "

So she did. On Jan. 1, 2004, the barn became a judo training center.

Her only rule was that if she was coming out of retirement for real — she made two other attempts in the 1990s that were quickly aborted — she would do it on her terms. That meant she could train in the comforts of their two-acre property while continuing to home-school Isabella and Breanna, now 6 and 11. That also meant she would no longer cut weight, instead competing up two divisions at 57 kilos (126 pounds).

Gotay's problem in 1992 was that she qualified for the Olympic team at age 16, then grew a couple of inches and gained the accompanying girth. But because she was locked into the 47-kilo division, she was faced with shedding 25 pounds in the four months before the Games.

She visited a doctor, who looked at her physique and measured her bone density. And frowned. Losing that much weight at that age under those conditions was a dangerous proposition.

"But what was I going to do?" Gotay says now. "Doctors always tell us not to do it, but boxers, judokas, wrestlers, we all do it anyway."

The result was nearly fatal. Gotay says her body took two years to fully recover, and she plunged into depression — "bitter." A career that started at age 4 in her father's San Diego judo studio had ended so suddenly, so tragically.

She moved on. She went to college to pursue a degree in psychology. She got married and got pregnant. She became a full-time mom.

The 2004 comeback began on a whim and ended with a second place at the 2004 Trials in San Diego, making her an alternate on the Athens Olympic team. It also got her thinking: If she came that close with only a few months of training, what could she do with a few years?

Gotay began working with Israel Hernandez, a two-time Olympic medalist from Cuba who became the U.S. national coach in 2005, at USA judo's new training center in Harlingen, Texas. She commuted at first, then tried to bring her daughters, and for the past year has left them in Temecula while she stayed in Harlingen to be a "full-time athlete."

"What is impressive to me is not that she came back after all these years," says Hernandez, who gives Gotay a reasonable shot at a medal when the women's 57-kilo division is contested Aug. 11 in Beijing. "What is impressive to me is how she trains. You can see every time she trains, she trains her hardest. She pushes herself. She does everything you ask her to do, every exercise."

Hernandez competed in the 1992 Olympics and is just three years older than Gotay. Now he's her coach. The other U.S. national coach, Jason Morris, was one of Gotay's teammates in Barcelona.

Sixteen years ago.

"People try to make that connection all the time, that it's unfinished business for me, and maybe subconsciously it's there," Gotay says. "But when I think about that time, I think about it as a different time. I think about it like two separate careers.

"I really don't feel like I have ghosts from the past."

Mark Zeigler writes about Olympic sports for the San Diego Union-Tribune. You can contact him by e-mail at mark.zeigler@uniontrib.com

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