Sprinting isn’t called an explosive event for nothing and personality clashes are rife in the 100m
ATHLETICS: Duncan Mackay
TO SAY that Donovan Bailey hates Linford Christie might be too strong. Dislikes him, probably. Wants to dust him right off the track, without doubt.
For proof, just look at his face, frozen on the finish line of the 100m in Nice recently, glancing scornfully away from his nemesis while he raises an index finger to the sky in victory. It is clear how much the victory meant to the Canadian.
Speed thrills, and nothing thrills more than fast head-to-head competition. But as we approach the Olympic 100m in Atlanta the rivalries between the men and women are becoming personal.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. In this event vanity co-exists with vulnerability, strength with weakness. But almost everywhere you look these days bitter battles are being waged between the sprinters.
“The nearest thing to a world-class sprinter is a thoroughbred racehorse,” said Frank Dick, Britain’s former director of coaching. “They have the same prickliness. They are highly tuned, on the edge. To call them showmen would be to risk trivialising what they do.” In physical terms, they are pretty perfect specimens. In mental terms, they are remarkable. The hype surrounding a big race these days is like that surrounding a world heavyweight title fight.
Indeed, the trash-talking men of the world-class sprints increasingly resemble boxers, with each race a claim for supremacy, each sprint a violent expenditure of energy.
The antipathy between Christie, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist, and Bailey, with Frankie Fredericks favourite to succeed him in Atlanta later this month, started in January when Bailey accused Christie of faking injury at last year’s world championships in Gothenburg, where he took the title from the Briton.
When Christie was told what the man who once claimed him as his inspiration had said, he was reported to be furious, threatened to “kick his butt” all summer and even talked of legal action.
Like all sprinters it seems, Christie needs a focus for his anger. His two most common targets have been journalists and the North Americans, who he believes have never recognised the value of his achievements.
In 1991, following defeat by world record holder Leroy Burrell in an indoor race at Cosford, Christie threatened to kill the American after a patronising glance at him mid-race, and an official had to step in to separate them.
Occasionally, things go beyond an exchange of harsh words. Two years ago in Zurich, Dennis Mitchell of the United States repeatedly kicked Nigeria’s Olapade Adeniken in the head while the latter was pinned to the floor of a hotel lobby by two other men.
“Sprinters are very aggressive people,” Christie says. “Hurdlers, for example, can talk to each other; sprinters cannot. Hurdlers go against the barriers, but sprinters go against each other.” Probably the most famous sprint rivalry in history was that between Carl Lewis and the man to whom he now refers as “that other guy” — Ben Johnson. Lewis has admitted that the first thing he thought when Johnson beat him in the Seoul Olympics eight years ago was “the bastard’s done it again”.
However, Johnson’s subsequent bans for drug abuse have retrospectively devalued the confrontations in the late 1980s which had the athletics world in ferment.
When Johnson disappeared off the scene, Christie became Lewis’s biggest rival. In today’s new- fashioned version of old-fashioned rivalries, athletes like Christie and Lewis are stoked by the desire not just for prestige and power but for fat endorsement contracts and rich purses.
When Christie took on Lewis in the Dash for Cash at Gateshead three years ago, it earned each man 100 000.
The women’s 100m also currently has two leading protagonists who cannot stand the sight of each other. Indeed, few female sprinters would be bothered if they never saw Gwen Torrence again. After finishing fourth in the Barcelona Olympics, Torrence said she was sure three of the runners in the race had used drugs, by implication meaning these in front of her.
There was an angry confrontation in the village afterwards between gold medallist Gail Devers and Torrence. Torrence was branded a sore loser and forced to issue an apology by the United States Olympic Committee, though she has never retracted her statement.
Merlene Ottey, one of these who felt slighted by Torrence’s attack, got her revenge at the world championships last year when the American was disqualified after winning the 200m for running out of her lane, thereby robbing her of the sprint double. Ottey’s view that Torrence had “cheated” poured more fuel on an already smouldering relationship.
The two do not speak to each other any more and Ottey has a clause in her contract with all grand prix meeting promoters which says she does not have to run if Torrence is in the race. It was a clause she activated in Stockholm recently when she refused to compete because her great rival was there.
Britain’s 1980 Olympic 100m champion Allan Wells directed his aggression not at one individual, but at American sprinters in general. Angered by their claims that Stanley Floyd would have won in Moscow had the United States not boycotted the Games, the Scotsman channelled his fury into beating Floyd at the first subsequent opportunity, in Koblenz.
When the Americans ranked Floyd above Wells at the end of the season, on the grounds that he had a 2-1 record over him,
Wells concentrated his efforts once again, fuelled by high-octane anger on a freezing night in Berlin, he beat the best of the American 200m sprinters by five clear yards.
Nearly all sprinters claim Jesse Owens as an idol but it is unlikely any of them will ever emulate the attitude he once showed towards a rival. It was shortly after he earned his four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Owens was racing in Cologne against the man who had taken the 100m silver for the second time, Ralph Metcalfe.
Owens led by two metres with 30m to go when he slowed deliberately to give his friend victory in one of the last races of his career. Metcalfe’s winning time was 10.3; Owens, who finished in 10.4, realised almost immediately that he might have become the first man to run the distance in 10.1 had he not eased up.
It did not worry him. “Some things are more important than winning,” Owens said when asked why he had done it. “Competition is nothing without friendship.” Whether Linford Christie, in retirement after this Olympic summer, Donovan Bailey or Dennis Mitchell will come to agree, is doubtful.