With several scorching performances leading up to Atlanta, Frankie Fredericks has dashed into the lead for the Olympic sprint titles
ATHLETICS: Julian Drew
ALREADY the greatest sprinter Africa has ever produced, Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks stands on the threshold of immortality.
When the eight fastest men in the world settle into the starting blocks for the Olympic 100m final on the evening of July 27, Fredericks will have a psychological advantage. Regarded as one of the best sprinters in the world after two silver medals in Barcelona and a world 200m title in Stuttgart in 1993, this year Fredericks has just been getting better and better .
Now he knows that if the form book holds he will be crowned Olympic champion in the blue riband event of the Games and join a long list of legends whose names are recorded for posterity on the Olympic victors’ roll.
Fredericks has long been thought of as more of a 200m man than a 100m sprinter, but he has always begged to differ with the experts on that account. “I think of myself as just a sprinter. I don’t think I’m necessarily better at one event than the other. I’ve just had better luck in the 200m,” says Fredericks.
This year he seems to have proved his point. After setting a world best over the seldom run indoor 100m in February he followed up for good measure with an incredible world record over 200m, reducing Linford Christie’s 1995 mark of 20.25 seconds to 19.92. He equalled his 100m personal best of 9.95 at St Denis on June 3.
On a cold night in Helsinki on June 25 he came within two hundredths of a second of the 100m world record. He clocked 9.87 seconds and left world champion Donovan Bailey of Canada two metres in his wake. A week later in Lausanne he went even faster but his 9.86 on the same track where Leroy Burrell set his world record two years before was still agonisingly short of the American’s mark.
Fredericks maturation into the ranks of the truly great has taken time, he will turn 28 later this year, but as the likes of Linford Christie and Carl Lewis have shown, that is not old for a sprinter. Although he went to Brigham Young University in America when he was 20 and got to compete on the extremely competitive collegiate circuit, Fredericks’s chance to race in international events came later than for most athletes because of his country’s ties with apartheid South Africa.
When Namibia finally got its independence Fredericks was eager to make his mark. After familiarising himself with the Grand Prix circuit in 1990 he set an African 100m record of 9.95 seconds in fifth place at the 1991 Tokyo world championships and took silver in the 200m behind Michael Johnson.
His Olympic and world championship successes followed as well as the 1994 Commonwealth 200m title and a silver once more in the 200m at last year’s world championships in Gothenburg where Johnson was again the bugbear. His main triumphs have come in the 200m and for the past five year’s he has never been ranked outside the world’s top two in the event, topping the pile in 1993, but always there has been Michael Johnson.
It’s not that Fredericks has never beaten Johnson, he claimed his scalp once in 1992, thrice in 1993 and twice in 1994. But those victories came at times when Johnson was either not focusing on the 200m or had injury problems. Since Fredericks won the 200m in Lausanne in July 1994 with Johnson unusually back in fourth, the Texan with the peculiar gait went on to create an air of invincibility.
But even with Johnson’s super human performances in Gothenburg last year and at the American Olympic trials a few weeks ago he himself always maintained he could be beaten. He may well have just been saying that to retain some semblance of modesty but he obviously didn’t count on it being anytime in the immediate future, especially with the Olympics looming on the horizon. Fredericks too was never completely overawed by Johnson despite studying his rear profile too many times for comfort.
“I think the race between Michael and me is decided by the lanes. If he’s in lane three and I’m in lane four then it makes things difficult but if it’s the other way round then I feel I can beat him. As long as I can chase him off the turn and run a good final 100m then I know it can be anybody’s race,” Fredericks said last year.
At last Friday’s Bislett Games in Oslo Johnson came to the meet on a high. At the American Olympic trials in Atlanta 11 days earlier he had shattered the oldest world record in the books, lowering Italian Pietro Mennea’s drug-and-altitude enhanced 200m time of 19.72 from 1979 to a 19.66.
Unbeaten since his slip up in Lausanne in 1994 and overwhelming favourite for the 200m/400m double at the Olympics, Johnson had enough reason to show a little swagger. Fredericks too was on a roll but it was in the 100m that he had been excelling and he was still not considered a match for Johnson over 200m.
Ominously for Fredericks he was drawn in the lane outside Johnson and would not be able to key off the American. When the gun went Fredericks didn’t worry about Johnson though and concentrated on running a good bend. They hit the home straight together and a titanic battle ensued as the lead see-sawed back and forth. The time in such cold conditions was immaterial but at the tape it was Fredericks who held the advantage, 19.82 to 19.85.
Within an instant Johnson was mortal once more.
That the guardians of the sport, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, saw fit to alter the Olympic schedule to accommodate Johnson’s ambitions for a unique double shows just how convinced they were that it was worth their while to lose a little face by bowing to the wishes of a mere athlete. An all-American hero at an American Olympics would be good for the television and marketing men.
And to the sporting moguls the interests of this constituency are primary.
Now Fredericks threatens to spoil the whole show. For not only could it be Johnson going for the second half of a historic double when they line up for the 200m final on August 1.
If Johnson manages to win the 400m and Fredericks the 100m, the 200m final promises to be one of the most exciting encounters of the Games as they both aim for a second shot at glory.
ENDS