`Run For Dream' Is A Moving Profile

----------------------------------------------------------------- Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers ry' 8 p.m. Sunday, Showtime. -----------------------------------------------------------------

She's expected to go for the gold again next month, and thanks to this movie, many more people may know her background.

The new Showtime drama profiles the athlete who earned the gold medal in the 100-meter dash at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona . . . a feat that was all the more remarkable because to attain it, she had to overcome Graves' disease, a condition that drastically affects the metabolic and nervous systems.

Charlayne Woodard ("Buffalo Girls," "Eye for an Eye") stars as Devers, with Louis Gossett Jr. - also an executive producer of the film - as her coach, Bob Kersee, who dedicated himself to helping her achieve her victory.

The cast also includes Jeffrey D. Sams ("Waiting to Exhale," "Courthouse") as Devers' husband, Robert Guillaume ("Benson") and Paula Kelly as her parents, and Tina Lifford ("South Central") as Kersee's famous wife Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Among the real-life sports figures appearing as themselves are Florence Griffith Joyner, football's Willie Gault and basketball's James Worthy; the teleplay was co-written by Dianne Houston, a recent Oscar nominee for her short subject "Tuesday Morning Ride" (which Showtime recently televised as part of its "Stories From the Edge" trilogy).

"You had to be at a certain level of fitness just to get the job," actress Woodard says of playing Devers, "but then, you had to get strong enough to sprint and hurdle. It was three weeks of very intense training for me." Moreover, Woodard had to duplicate Devers' specific style on the track, "which was good for me. I had never run before, so learning to run like her was easy. I didn't have to unlearn anything."

Woodard also watched tapes of Devers' races and interviews, though she didn't have a much time for that: "We had 19 days to do this in, so it was really crazy. Besides that, the day before we started, the script changed completely. They say it's always like this when you make a TV movie, and if you get an injury while you're making one - like I did on this - you just work right through it."

The actress ended up getting more information on Graves' disease than she bargained for, given the short preparation time she had, "because as soon as I started poking around, I ran into people who'd had it. With medication, they're fine now, but they told me about their symptoms and how they felt. Gail had other complications that made her illness kind of unique from everybody else's, because her feet became swollen, and (doctors) almost amputated them. She just wouldn't allow that, though."