Bolt beating Gatlin is NOT going to save our sport
20 years on from his superb double triumph in Atlanta, Michael Johnson has fears over the drug crisis that taints athletics
HERE on a strip of indoor running track some 40 miles north of Dallas, could be glimpsed the quirkiest running style that has ever propelled a prodigy to Olympic legend. The head and back remained as still and straight as the Statue of Liberty herself. The body was lean and every movement was a clear picture of meticulous attention.
We were visiting Michael Johnson’s home state of Texas 20 years on from that night in Atlanta, Georgia, when his short stride pitter-pattered itself to the never-before, neveragain double of 200 and 400 metres gold.
Those Games had been tarnished by commercialism, inefficiency, jingoism, and even pipe bombings, by the time, on the 14th day, Johnson took his second title in 19.32sec, smashing his own 200m world record to smithereens.
He was 28 years old and the saving face of those cursed Olympics. Now he is 48, still only an indiscernible five pounds heavier than in the prime of his career, and joining in with a basketball session as part of his ‘Michael Johnson Young Leaders’ initiative to support sportsmen and women from around the world help their communities.
When the basketball is over they cross his eponymous Performance Center in McKinney to the adjacent track.
He does not push himself anywhere near his limits. When was the last time, I wondered, he had a stopwatch on him?
He replied: ‘2000 in Sydney, the last race before I retired.’
By his standards, he merely jogs and so one of the young sports leaders, a 20-year-old college rugby player from Los Angeles called Noah Trotter, can tell his grandkids that he beat Michael Johnson.
On the walls of the Center hang the running suits Johnson wore at three Olympics — in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney. There is also a pair of gold shoes, not the gold shoes, but a later version. The ones from 1996 have been auctioned off.
Enough about the old days. What about the human glories and the drugs horrors of modern athletics?
First for discussion is the man who succeeded him as the king of the track, Usain Bolt, now aged 29.
Can the great Jamaican add a third set of 100m and 200m golds to his collection, despite the hamstring tear that recently caused him to call in on his Munich-based doctor, Hans Muller-Wohlfahrt, and raised fears about his participation in Rio?
Bolt is due to run in the Anniversary Games in London on Friday, effectively a fitness test for Rio. Assuming he is fit, can he run 100m in sub 9.10sec in Rio and obliterate his own world record of 9.58sec, as he believes is possible?
‘I’d be careful in saying that sub 9.10 is not imaginable,’ said Johnson. ‘Ultimately, someone will do that. But I don’t believe Bolt is going to. I think we have seen the best of him.
‘He won’t need to be the best Bolt in Rio because he is just that good. The best Bolt puts a huge gap between himself and everybody else on the planet. He only needs to be healthy. If he is, he wins.
‘His biggest challenge is staying fit. As history indicates, he was always likely to get injuries this year and if I had to predict what will happen, he gets injured, he won’t have much time to compete, he won’t have much time to recover.
‘On the eve of the Olympics, we’ll all be debating whether he can win — and then he will win.’
Johnson is unconvinced by the gold-medal potential of the pretenders.
Tyson Gay: ‘Too prone to injuries’; Asafa Powell: ‘A finalist but not a championship-medal performer’; Justin Gatlin (the fastest man this year with 9.80sec compared to Bolt’s 9.88sec): ‘The biggest threat but unlikely to be any stronger than last year (9.74sec)’.
Bolt and Johnson are different kinds of men. Bolt is languid, playful. Johnson is a self-confessed control freak, a strategist to a fault.
But for all Bolt’s flamboyance, there is something they share, apart from natural brilliance as sprinters.
‘We always knew Bolt was a great athlete,’ said Johnson. ‘But last year he proved he was also an amazing competitor.
‘He wasn’t in great form at the World Championships in Beijing. He didn’t have much time to train or many races to warm up in those crucial few weeks leading up to the meeting. At that time, Justin Gatlin was in amazing shape and ran a great race — but Bolt still won it.’
Gatlin brings us to the problems of today’s athletics. He is the twice-convicted drugs cheat, whose presence at the World Championships represented sporting evil.
He was facing Bolt, who stood for sporting virtue. Victory for the latter was widely seen as a significant tonic for clean sport.
Johnson, whose cheating teammate Antonio Pettigrew caused him to hand back his ‘tainted’ relay gold medal from Sydney, is not swept along by that narrative.
‘No, I don’t think that was good for the sport as such,’ he said of Bolt’s triumph. ‘What has happened since, stories of widespread doping in Russia and the complicity of the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) in covering up failed tests, proves my point.
‘The issues afflicting track and field were not repaired by the fact Bolt won that race. There is a much bigger problem that needs to be dealt with at source. It is not solved overnight or over one season and certainly not over one sprint.
‘As for the next question, I have no idea (how) to put it right. This is worse than Ben Johnson (the Canadian sprinter who shocked the world when he failed a test at the 1988 Olympics). He was one athlete cheating.
‘This is about the organisation, the IAAF, that is entrusted to protect clean athletes knowingly let dirty athletes compete. It’s beyond anything I could have imagined.’
Johnson is a friend of Sebastian Coe, the IAAF president and double Olympic 1,500m champion.
But he is concerned by Coe’s early work in office — his apparent unawareness of how corrupt his predecessor Lamine Diack’s regime was and an initial slowness to project a sense of urgency amid a crisis for the sport.
‘Seb is very committed to athletics,’ said Johnson. ‘But he has a lot to prove right now and I think he knows that.
‘Having said that, I’d love to hear those people who feel he is not the right man for the job, say who they would replace him with. They would also have to tell me that person has accepted the job.’
‘I’m willing to give Seb a chance but he has to demonstrate that he is up to the task. He has made some missteps early on. He should have seen that remaining a Nike ambassador, given the problems over transparency issues that were dogging the previous leadership, was not right. He had to show he was neutral.’
Johnson’s role as an erudite BBC pundit at Rio brings him into close
contact with British athletes. So who does he think can win track and field gold for Team GB next month?
He picks out for consideration the big ones — heptathlete Jessica Ennis, 5,000 and 10,000 metre man Mo Farah and long jumper Greg Rutherford, the triumvirate of Super Saturday gold medallists who rocked the stadium in London in 2012.
Nobody else registers in his golden category, certainly not our sprinters who, he believes, suffer from the residual curse of the 2000s when they were rewarded for mediocrity.
Mo? ‘It will continually get harder for Mo,’ declares Johnson. ‘But as long as he stays healthy — and he doesn’t show any chink in his armour yet — I believe the rest of the world will concede. He’s that good. He can win from anywhere.’
Jess? ‘Winning last year after having a baby gave her an incredible amount of confidence. She is in great form this season. Staying fit is the only issue given her history.’
Greg, who reacted sensitively to Johnson’s critique at the world championships last year?
‘He has shown that he can beat anyone as long as the level of competition is not very high.
‘I won’t play with the narrative of whether or not that’s a slight on Greg. I don’t feel I’ve anything to prove there, though he loves that.
‘The facts are the facts. I believe the level will increase this year because it just can’t stay that low forever. Any good athlete will be preparing for that. So I am sure that Greg is. But it will be tough.’