|
|
HOT STUFFMichael Johnson's blazing 200 was the highlight of the underattended, overheated U.S. track trialsby Kenny Moore
The eye went right with Michael Johnson in the 200-meter final, right with the gold hoop in his left ear, with his favorite metallic-purple shoes as they twinkled into a blur off the turn. In the straightaway the precision of his stride masked its power, at least until the eye pulled back to compare him with other mortals near the finish and couldn't find any within four meters. Dutifully, as his coach, Clyde Hart, had asked, Johnson ran hard well past the finish line.
The eye went to the clock. It read 19.66. The eye, knowing the world record was 19.72, went to the wind gauge. A day earlier Johnson had run 19.70 in the semifinals but had been pushed by too much breeze for the time to count as a record. Now the gauge read +1.7 meters per second. Anything less than 2.0 is legal. He had done it.
Johnson blew away
photograph by
Johnson's own eye had caught sight of that 19.66, but since he is the soul of practicality, he didn't even turn to learn the wind reading. "I knew if it was over the limit, I'd hear some moans and groans," he would say later. "I didn't. I knew."
He threw up his arms in a gesture that included all the 30,000 people he had induced to witness the final race of the eight-day U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Atlanta's new Olympic Stadium. His was a gratification deferred for years.
The previous 200-meter record had been set by Italy's Pietro Mennea in the altitude of Mexico City 17 years earlier. Mennea, who later acknowledged that he had used performance-enhancing drugs during his career, was labeled by the Italian press as "the luckiest man in the history of track and field" because his mark miraculously survived year after year. In 1983 it nearly fell to a young Carl Lewis, who started celebrating 10 meters from the tape and slowed to 19.75. Then Mike Marsh had the record dead to rights in the 1992 Olympics, but because he was in a semifinal, he coasted home and missed by .01 of a second.
Johnson had been ready to take the record for at least four years, since running 19.79 in the 1992 Olympic trials, in miasmal New Orleans. But he had so thrown himself into preparing for his shining goal—the Olympic 200-400 double never accomplished by any man—that he had not often tried for a record. Indeed, his best times, another 19.79 in the 200 and a 43.39 in the 400 (.1 of a second from Butch Reynolds's world record), had both come in the finals of the 1995 world championships in Sweden, when Johnson was tired from rounds of preliminaries.
So devoted is he to the Olympic double that he said last week, "I would take being a 200-400 double gold medalist over being the world-record holder in the 400 any day." Presciently, he omitted the 200 record. But what a natural goal the double is for Johnson, so celebrated for being an academic grind. Who better to take on twice as much work for extra credit? Who could be a better fit for the onrushing Olympics, this coming-out cotillion for the corporate New South, than Johnson, who has his own Web page and wrote a seamlessly unrevealing column during the trials for USA Today?
It's easy to forget the man is hard. Johnson last lost an outdoor 400 final in the 1988 trials, when he was running with a broken fibula. For 10 years he has done searing workouts of "quality volume, minimum rest," sprinting in 100° heat in Waco, Texas.
In eight trials races in Atlanta he confessed to a single mistake, one that cost him a second world record. "There are a lot of things you have to concentrate on in the 400," he said, "and two of them are opposites: aggression and relaxation. It's very tempting to go right to the relaxing before the aggressing."
In the 400-meter final he felt he yielded to that temptation. He came out of the blocks even with his old rival Reynolds, whose dignity and eight-year-old world record are about all Johnson hasn't stripped from him. These are men of different tactics. The tall Reynolds begins fairly modestly and runs down faster starters in the final 100. Johnson bolts through the first 100, floats through the second (ideally reaching the 200 in 21 seconds), blasts through the third and holds on with form and fire in the last. This time he hit the 200 in 21.2, but because he began the race at Reynolds's pace, he had had to work, not float, through the backstretch to get there.
"That was the mistake," Johnson said. He hit the stretch five meters clear of Reynolds and paid the price for his error by tying up in the last steps. He clocked 43.44, the fastest 400 time ever run on U.S. soil and the third fastest anywhere. Reynolds broke 44 for the first time since 1988, with 43.91. "I can give him an arm," said Reynolds of the gap he surrendered over that third 100 meters, "but I can't give him two."
In the hurdles Allen Johnson tied the U.S. mark, and Gail Devers, who had already qualified in the 100, earned a chance to double.
photograph by
In making his second Olympic team at 32, Reynolds was one of a remarkable number of older champions who seemed rejuvenated in these torrid trials. Atlanta's humidity was palpable. Temperatures, even in deep magnolia shade, reached 100° (113° on the track). Ozone levels rose as well. "The athletes may be the lucky ones," said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an editorial headlined airing atlanta's dirty secret. "When the competition is finished, they'll leave Atlanta. The rest of us live here."
In this cauldron, younger pretenders seemed to boil off, leaving an Olympic team of graying greats. Lynn Jennings, 36 on July 1, and Mary Slaney, 37, went one-two in the women's 5,000 meters. Jackie Joyner-Kersee, 34, was able to make only one attempt in the long jump, with both her strained thighs wrapped tight. "I prayed that if I pulled, let it be when I'm already in the air," she said. The jump, 23'11/4", held up.
Regina Jacobs, 32, made her third U.S. team by winning the women's 1,500 in 4:08.67. Behind her, 1988 Olympian Vicki Huber had come into the stretch fourth. "I said to myself, You can get third," Huber would say later. "It's amazing how long the conversation in my head was." Huber ran down Amy Wickus for the precious place (only the top three make the team).
And there was the essence of gray, Johnny Gray, the 1992 Olympic bronze medalist at 800 meters and the U.S.-record holder at that distance. He won the 800 in 1:44.00 on his 36th birthday. Gray has run 1:44.09 or better for 12 years in a row.
Was it coincidence that leathery old Olympians dealt best with the conditions? "It's the same for everybody," is what you always hear, but of course it's not the same. Athletes who had not heat-trained their systems to pour out sweat in buckets without losing the mineral electrolytes that keep muscles from firing on their own suffered fateful spasms.
The decathletes, who were out in the heat longest, were at greatest risk, yet three of them performed magnificently. Dan O'Brien won with 8,726 points. Steve Fritz was second with 8,636. Third was Chris Huffins, whose 8,546 points were the product of seven personal bests in the 10 events. If there was a secret to their indestructibility, it was the intravenous drip. O'Brien made the IV seem a lurid pleasure. "It cools from the inside out," he said, shivering. "Oh, my core is feeling good. I think I broke the world record for IVs. Three in this arm, one in this."
Since the warmup track was half a mile away, the athletes, once limber and ready to race, had to sit and chill and retighten on a little green air-conditioned bus. Sprinters cramped before, during and after their races. Carl Lewis (35 on July 1) was running in the men's 100 final when both his calves knotted, and he finished eighth. Yet what cramps took from Lewis in the 100, they gave back in the long jump. Not his own cramps, but those of 33-year-old Mike Conley. In the last round world-record holder Mike Powell, 32, rescued himself from a hideous day by leaping 27'6-1/2" and going from sixth to first. That shoved Lewis (27'2-3/4") into third and Conley into fourth. Conley had one jump left. But a few steps into his run his left hamstring informed him that he no longer had its support. Conley hopped into the pit and gave a little wave, his grace fooling many into thinking he had deferred to Lewis. But later his voice was hoarse with emotion when he said that if he had knocked Lewis off his fifth Olympic team, why that was the idea of this supremely cutthroat competition, wasn't it?
It was, and in such high stakes lay danger and difficulty for the endurance athletes. One move, that's all a 5,000 or 10,000 runner got. Then the heat swarmed in. With a kilometer to go in the men's 5,000, Bob Kennedy and Reuben Reina had a 20-meter lead on the field. Reina let Kennedy break away. Under normal circumstances Reina would have held on to second or third. In Atlanta he was dead on his feet before the last lap and finished 15th. "You have to respect the heat," said Kennedy, who won by 10.52 seconds, "not fear it."
Fear may be the correct response for paramedics at the Games. In the men's 10,000, which was won by Todd Williams, two-time Olympic marathoner Ed Eyestone was holding third with less than three laps left. In the next 600 meters Eyestone faded to fourth and, showing the classic signs of heatstroke, ended up staggering, disoriented, onto the infield and motioning for aid. Finally a photographer reached him and summoned help.
Much of this suffering took place before a sea of empty blue seats. Even when there were 10,000 or 15,000 spectators in the 83,100-seat stadium, it never looked it because many were under the upper deck, hiding from the sun. This made the more thoughtful Olympians imagine that they were holding out a torch and finding no one of the next generation there to take it.
Lewis, cooling down after the long jump, alone but for a pair of wheeling bats in the soft midnight air above the practice track, pointed out that trials tickets, food and parking "cost a family $100 a day." He looked at the surrounding neighborhood, one into which athletes were forcefully advised not to go. "Kids don't need money to run," he said. "They need inspiration. On TV, it's strange, but you're not real to them. Kids need to see and touch and know that you're flesh and blood. So they should be here, tens of thousands of them. We're keeping our sport in a bottle for the people who love it. We have to open up the bottle and give the sport back to America, so America can embrace it. They should have filled the place even if everyone got in free."
It seemed too late to throw open the doors, but then Johnson, Atlanta's own Gwen Torrence and a pair of heart-wrenching hurdlers compelled 30,141 spectators to come out Sunday for the meet's hottest, fastest day. Torrence, running on a sore left thigh she hurt before winning the 100 on June 15, started well in the 200 but hit the stretch no better than third. Carlette Guidry muscled on to win from Dannette Young, 22.14 seconds to 22.18, leaving one spot. Inger Miller, daughter of 1968 Olympic 100-meter silver medalist Lennox Miller, outleaned Torrence for it. "Leg didn't hurt," Torrence said later. "I can't put it on anything. I don't think I wanted it as bad as the 100."
In the 200,
photograph by
Not wanting it was not the problem for Jack Pierce. In the semis of the 110 hurdles Pierce, the 1992 Olympic bronze medalist, had clocked a personal best, 12.94, just .03 from the world record. "It felt so fluid," he said, "I thought if I pushed a little in the final.... I wanted the world record and to make the team, in that order."
That shift in focus proved disastrous. In the final Pierce started so fast that he caught his lead leg under the top of the first hurdle, then slammed to a stop against the second. Allen Johnson, the '95 world champion, shot by, thinking of nothing but hurdling, and finished in 12.92, equaling the U.S. record.
So it was left to Michael Johnson to keep his priorities straight. "The objectives never changed," he said after his blazing 19.66. "First to make the team, then to win and then, if all went well, to break the 200 record." Johnson went on, patiently detailing how his coach, Hart, had gotten him to improve his form in the race's first steps because he had a tendency to pop up before he had fully accelerated. Suddenly you noticed that several Atlantans—female and so nicely dressed that they surely had come down from one of the air-conditioned corporate skyboxes built in anticipation of the post-Olympic surrender of the stadium to the Braves—were attending to his every word.
"So," said Johnson finally. "It's great to have it broken. Now the Olympics will be a chance to make some history." He rose to go. The women put their heads together and declared him to be "absolutely charming."
So it's still true, what everyone from Scarlett O'Hara to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has taught us. In Atlanta, the quality of one's charm depends a great deal on the quality of one's endurance.
|
|
