ARNOLD TAKING A LEAP OF FAITH.

Byline: Karen Crouse

Dominique Arnold herds oversized carts. That's what he does when he's not dreaming big dreams. Sometimes, like with sprinting and hurdling, he can't dissociate the two acts.

He can be pushing a stray cart to safety in the Home Depot parking lot in Canoga Park and his mind will be a world away in Sydney and the next thing Arnold knows he is racing to keep up with the cart as though it were Mark Crear or 1996 Olympic gold medalist Allen Johnson.

``If someone put a camera on me I'd be fired,'' Arnold says with a laugh.

At least Arnold hasn't hurdled any parked cars in his path. But then, the Sydney Olympics are half a year away yet. As the U.S. trials in July draw nearer, there's no telling how carried away Arnold will get in his pursuit of an improbable dream.

For the sprint hurdles specialist, the road to this year's Summer Games has been a labyrinth, full of dead ends and switchbacks; dark passages and serendipitous connections.

It has taken him from Long Beach to Pullman, Wash., to Northridge. From budding to bygone to back and seemingly better.

The road goes through Atlanta this week. Starting today Arnold will compete at the U.S. Indoor Championships at the Georgia Dome. He is the one everybody else will be chasing in the 60-meter hurdles, the event he won last month at New York's Millrose Games at the expense of Crear, the fastest hurdler in the world last year.

Arnold's is an endearing tale, prescription medicine for a public sick of hearing about athletes bulking up on steroids and IOC members getting fat on freebies and a modern Olympic movement heavy on hypocrisy.

Arnold, 26, runs in sneakers he doesn't get for free; in meets he isn't paid to grace; and until this year with nothing more than a stopwatch's reading as his reward.

To be sure, he has a better shot at making the Olympic squad than anybody gave marathoner Christine Clark before she moved up 21 spots to win the U.S. trials last week in Columbia, S.C. Arnold is trying to reinforce the image of topflight athletes that Clark, a 37-year-old working mother, portrayed in her victory:

The Olympian as measurably more human than machine.

Cheering for Arnold isn't hard. It's like rooting for spring, for sentimentality, for simplicity.

``I think about making the Olympic team all the time,'' Arnold says dreamily, his delivery as hypnotic as the rhythmic tapping on this day of raindrops on the roof of the Cal State Northridge athletic office. ``Running fast and making the team and wearing my country's colors and floating over the hurdles like they don't even exist. Getting a medal and fulfilling a dream.''

Arnold runs with an ease that belies the rocky path he has taken. After distinguishing himself at Long Beach Wilson High and Long Beach City College, Arnold went to Washington State and washed dishes in the dormitory cafeteria to pay for the expenses not picked up by his partial athletic scholarship.

He won an NCAA title in the hurdles as a senior, in 1996. By that time Arnold also had become a friend and sometime training partner of decathlete Dan O'Brien. O'Brien opened his home to Arnold and gave him advice on the track. One of his tips has proved particularly helpful recently.

``He told me how to sign autographs,'' Arnold says, grinning. ``I used to write my name out all slow. I'd make a nice, full loop in the ``q'' and dot my i's. And Dan was like, `Man, you've got to shorten your autograph. You've got to write like a doctor.' ''

Arnold signed off on track not long after he failed to make the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. He finished that year with the 35th fastest time in the hurdles but he might as well have been ranked 350 for how good he felt about his abilities.

In 1997, after completing work on his degree in fine arts, Arnold returned to Southern California, moved in with a friend in Encino and went about trying to find a ``real'' job in animation.

After years of feeling like he was running in place, Arnold thought he was ready to settle down to a life of drawing continuously moving characters. With his sketchings riding shotgun, Arnold made it as far as the front gate at the Disney Studios in Burbank before being turned away.

Animation's loss was American track's gain. With time to kill one afternoon, Arnold got in his car and drove to the CSUN track. Just for the fun of it, he set up some hurdles and started gliding over them. It was just like riding a bike.

Jeff McAuley, the Matadors track coach, caught a glimpse of Arnold, introduced himself to the hurdler and handed him one of his business cards. Be it dumb luck or destiny Arnold had stumbled upon the one place where he wouldn't be turned away.

``Meeting Jeff was like a gift,'' Arnold says. ``He's stuck his neck out for me.''

McAuley would give Arnold room, board and a new lease on his hurdling career.

Some hurdles, though, remained Arnold's alone to bear. He needed some source of income but had to keep his days free to train. So Arnold jumped when a fraternity brother offered him a position as a night clerk at a motel in Reseda in late 1998.

Working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift had its moments. ``A lot of scary moments,'' Arnold says.

There was the night he got in a little unexpected anaerobic training chasing after some hoodlums who were trying to break into cars in the motel parking lot. Then there was the time Arnold returned from his break to find an inebriated kid fresh from his high school Prom Night attacking the motel manager.

Mostly what Arnold remembers of those lost seven months was fighting fatigue. A bleary-eyed Arnold wondered more than once if his dream was worth not getting any sleep.

Fortunately, McAuley trusted Arnold's stock would rise long before Arnold effectively went public at last summer's U.S. championships. He finished fifth in the 110-meter hurdles despite clipping the second hurdle.

His placing wasn't high enough to earn Arnold a berth in the World Championships but it did gain him entree into the world's top-10 list, the Pan American Games, the Olympic jobs program at Home Depot, the Millrose Games and by virtue of all that, the public consciousness.

When Arnold edged Crear in the race at Madison Square Garden, the papers the next morning trumpeted the victory of the ``lightly-regarded'' hurdler. Oh well. The word will get out soon enough about how tough Arnold really is.

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Photo: (color) ``I think about making the Olympic team all the time . . . Getting a medal and fulfilling a dream,'' hurdler Dominique Arnold said.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer