Michael Johnson, the greatest athlete of his era, is about to retire. In a rare interview, he talks about his rivals (or the lack of them), relaxing (he can’t), and the one race he’d like to be able to run again
Laura Thompson
So what does the world think of Michael Johnson? That he is as arrogantly sure of his talent as a Nureyev. That he is as remote and untouchable as a Van Gogh in a Japanese bank vault. That he is as pursued, flattered and fted as a pneumatic oil heiress at her high school prom. That he is laid-back to the point of horizontality. And here’s a surprise: after spending around an hour in his company, I can reveal, exclusively, that all of those things are true. Why shouldn’t they be? Why should Johnson be any way other than this? How, indeed, could anything else be expected? After all, in a culture which seeks constantly to create sporting heroes out of inferior material, he is the real thing: one of the few of whom one can say with certainty that he will be impossible to replace. For here, in the arena of ephemerality, where the Baileys and Boldons and Burrells blaze their trail like shooting stars, was something different. Johnson’s dominance over 200m and 400m seemed to belong to an older era: he was in the tradition of Jesse Owens, Tommie Smith and Carl Lewis. Nowadays, when every top athlete has access to a state-of-the-art fibrillation counter, protein-to-carbohydrate ratio analyser and wind-resistant spandex leotard, it is sometimes hard to see how any of them can still achieve total and consistent supremacy. Yet some do; and none more than Michael Johnson. During his career he won five Olympic golds and nine world titles, and set six world records, including the barely credible 19,32 seconds for 200m and 43,18 for 400m. “Hey,” as Roger Black would say in his racing days, with a violently good-humoured smile, “lets face it, the rest of us are just running for second, right?” The way in which Johnson talks makes it clear (painfully so to his rivals) that if he has a fear of failure, it relates only to himself, not to any other athlete. “The pressure is from within, that I put upon myself, because I feel like if I don’t win, then I haven’t done my job. Because I’m supposed to win.”
How can he see it any other way? Whenever he pulled all the stops out which, when it really mattered, he always did he was not just better than the rest, he was running in another sphere. And so, when asked whether he is motivated by competition, he says: “I think I’ve gotten over that, you know, over the years. I’ve moved beyond that, and I’ve started to focus on building a career that parallels only a few people who’ve ever been in the sport. And that’s where my focus has been, the past six or so years. Because from that point I’ve moved beyond having a rival.” Easy to see, when this little speech is translated into black and white, why Johnson has been accused of arrogance; why as with Manchester United, there have been people positively dying to see him beaten and why athletes such as Donovan Bailey, Maurice Greene and even Mark Richardson have seized their moment to put the boot in. Of course Johnson is arrogant. Once again how could he be otherwise? And is it really arrogance to know one’s own worth, to do the right thing by one’s own talent? Is it not more like honesty? It is, in the end, the inexplicable factors that create the champions. Who could have conceived an athletics legend who ran like a policeman in a silent film, fists aloft, legs pedalling for dear life beneath that poker-stiff body? His athletics coach at Skyline high school described that style as “like a statue … they say his feet never touch the ground”. By the age of 23, the trucker’s son from Texas was world number one at the 200m and 400m. Really, when one thinks of all the agony that goes into most athletes’ training routines, as they try to perfect their wretched stride patterns and knee actions what must they have felt when they saw Johnson go scuttling past them, his little feet pitter-pattering like drops of relentless gold rain, his ramrod back moving inexorably away from them? What a doubly insulting sight it must have been: almost funny, if it hadn’t been so nastily devastating. Meanwhile, for many spectators, the Johnson style (which has, of course, been analysed for its effectiveness: no wasted effort, stride pattern easily maintained, and so on) was nothing short of a joy. To me it was not unlike watching a great actor like Laurence Olivier, whose idiosyncrasies always teetered upon the ludicrous but whose touch was always completely certain. For there is pure, childlike pleasure to be taken in some people who are so sure of what they are doing that they can do it their own way, even when that seems to fly in the face of reason. It is funny, seeing them go off into the realms of near absurdity with two fingers raised to the boring orthodoxies.
In the end, what Johnson seemed to be saying was: sod this, I’m my own man and that man knows exactly what he is doing. A reassuring sight; and one that allowed sport to transcend, for 19 or 43 seconds at a time, the limits of its ever more circumscribed, commercialised world. Of course Johnson is a part of that world. How with Nike wrapping his peerless feet in gold for his Olympic runs could he not be? His transcendent talent has made him a rich man. His appearance fee is $100?000 a?race. In 1997 he signed a six-year agreement with Nike worth a basic $12-million. Appropriately, when he won the 400m Olympic final in Sydney last year he was wearing shoes with insets of real gold (a pair of these is kept at home in Dallas, another at the Nike museum in Oregon). When I meet Johnson, he is in England to attend the World Sports Awards where, with graceful lack of surprise, he will receive his accolade as best track and field athlete. He is present too, to confirm his retirement, at which announcement a lot of athletes will no doubt collapse to the ground in an agony of relief. In the minds of these rivals, Johnson had become a colossus, impregnable as an iceberg. He looked that way during his races, surrounded by an aura of annihilating supremacy so strong it seemed to glow white under the stadium lights.
In the flesh, however, he is a subtler being. He is 1,86m tall but most of his 76kg-plus seems to be packed into his legs, which are almost disproportionately lllshort llllland strong. llllllOf course, watching him run it is the legs that you notice. Close up, you see instead his rather narrow head with its long elegant bones, and eyes that constantly threaten to close (from boredom?) but whose gaze, nonetheless, is penetrating. His smile, when it comes, transforms him, but it does not come very often. His voice whose accent wears a Stetson, the man having lived all his life in Texas is as deep as the Mississippi. When it flows it is beguiling, but quite often it does not. What do you do to relax from running? “Nothing.” Do you ever dream about running? “No, ah don’t.” The most striking thing is how adult he looks: at least his 33 years, and a different breed altogether from that callow mannequin who is the modern sportsman. He strikes an almost incongruous figure in this photographic studio in rainy Battersea. Dressed obediently in his Nike, he looks like a man with a secret yearning to put on a suit and tie. The flunkeys who fuss over him like 80-year-old equerries fluttering around the Queen Mother are treated with total, regal indifference. Johnson is submitting himself to the publicity rigmarole, as he knows he occasionally must, with the air of someone who would expect no less than everyone’s attention but to whom this attention means precisely nothing. He is polite, not especially friendly, essentially disengaged. And yet, at the same time, he somehow gives the impression that beneath the impregnable faade there is intelligence, humour and acute awareness. You have no idea whatsoever of how he would behave in the rest of his life maybe exactly the same but you feel that it would be worth meeting him there. Above all, though, you sense that here is a man for whom talent has been destiny. When ability is that strong, it overmasters everyone: including the person who possesses it. This can happen in two ways. Some, like George Best, are unable to live up to their overmastering talent; others, like Michael Johnson, accept their great gift and push themselves to keep up with it. You felt you had a responsibility towards your ability? “Right.”
Johnson is a religious man, and back in 1996, after his 200m and 400m triumphs at the Atlanta Olympics, he said: “There is never a day when I forget to thank our Lord for touching me with greatness. Such supreme ability is a wonderful thing, yet I would never be so foolish as to take it for granted.”
Obviously this belief of his would have strengthened the desire to fulfil his potential: but the sense, nonetheless, is of someone who would have pushed himself whatever. Never have I met anyone so marked out by their talent, so innately separate, so focused and motivated and centred and all those other things that people witter on about nowadays but that, with Johnson, acquire true meaning. Nothing in fact, seems to touch him. It is not just the flunkies at the court of Nike who are protecting him from the world, not is it his multimillion-dollar fortune; it is his talent, that priceless bit of gold inside. He is impossibly remote and glossy, an athlete for whom failure and fear are concepts that seem not to exist. Of course they do, theoretically. “I’m only a mistake away from losing a race,” says Johnson, and occasionally very occasionally he has done so.
It is rather strange, though, talking to someone who is “honest” in this way. What, for example, does he feel about his detractors, who are quite obviously motivated by jealousy? “If that bothered me, I’d always be bothered. So I can’t let things like that bother me.” Well, quite. This is the quintessential Johnson answer: saying very little, because what is there to say? Only this central, vital, all-consuming point continues to be illustrated, of his innate separateness from everything except the demands of his talent even his family.
Has having a son changed your attitude to running? “Not at all.”
That’s not an answer you’d get from, say, David Beckham.
And so when the nasty niggly stories get printed about how he allegedly swore at some children who asked for his autograph before a 1999 meeting in Stockholm, I for one accept the defence he gave at the time, that he was warming up for his race and didn’t want to be disturbed: “This is a job and I have to be focused on that.” After all, it is running that he is paid to do.
But this stand-offish image has been contrasted snidely, over the past year or so, with that of professional smiler Greene, who works the press like a Princess Diana and who has managed to present a threat to Johnson over 200m. Hence the marketing of the trials for the US Sydney Olympics team as a “grudge match” between the two athletes who, we were breathlessly told, did not speak to each other except via media-relayed insults. Greene demonstrated his way with a soundbite by saying of his rival: “If he’s Superman, then I’m Kryptonite.” Johnson took a subtler, typically dismissive approach: “Since Carl Lewis, there has not been an athlete I can get excited about running against. I don’t personalise my rivals. They have no faces or names.”
When Greene and Johnson met in the 200m trial, both pulled up with cramp in the heat and the great showdown turned into an even greater letdown. Although this was a shame from a sport point of view, the suspicion was that it had been hyped out of all existence in order to sell tickets for the trials, which normally can be hardly given away. For, as is often observed, athletics has a mysteriously low profile in the US: something about which Johnson has the usual kind of thing to say: “You know, that’s something that … I don’t really care about. Because in my professional situation, it’s different from most athletes, because I’ve really transcended the whole … But I don’t really care what the profile of athletics is in the US what difference does it make? That’s not why I’m in the sport.” Honest, again, and somewhat refreshing, when you think of the load of waffle that so many athletes would have given me at that point; and of the gleam of humour in Johnson’s half-closed eyes as he refused to do so. It is true, too, that Johnson did not conceive of himself as a “career” athlete (presumably, if it had been “profile” he was after, he could have gone into American football). “I always enjoyed competing and running, and that’s why I did it not to become an Olympic athlete. I just enjoyed it I enjoyed all sports, but mostly track. Probably because I was winning.” But he did not, as one might have imagined, nip off to university in order to pursue this end. “I didn’t go to college thinking, I’m going to be a track and field athlete, and I’m just going there to get this degree in marketing. I went to school to get a degree. And when I was there, getting my degree, which was why I was there, was when I discovered that I might be able to turn running into a career. Fortunately I was able to do that.” This emphasis upon the degree is instructive. It confirms the impression of Johnson’s upbringing in Texas as one that instilled a respect for achievement, not just for fame and fortune: two of his sisters are teachers, his brother a computer systems analyst and a third sister a special investigator for the government. It is not, then, so surprising that Johnson did not take running seriously until it was clear there was a career in it; before that, he thought, “the job opportunities in marketing were good” (with a product such as himself, certainly. Could he have dreamt up the gold shoes?).
But the degree for its own sake also reminds one that Johnson is very much a thinking athlete. “Most people don’t understand what kind of mental process we have to go through, and how important that is. You know, in the 400m, it takes many years to really ever figure which strategy is best for you and to perfect that. And once you do learn, it’s very difficult to duplicate that day in and day out. It’s the athlete that can get closest to doing that who is going to win.”
And it is the combination of talent plus willingness to understand talent, that is going to create a true and enduring champion. It all came to perfect fruition in that great golden burst of Atlanta 1996, when, the schedule having been quite rightly adjusted for him, Johnson arrived with 55 consecutive 400m title wins behind him and became the first Olympic athlete to win both 200m and 400m. That achievement took those rather tawdry games and showed them in a clear, beautiful, sporting light. The final of the 200m, in particular in which he splintered his own world record, running the first 100m in 10,12 seconds and the second in 9,20 was so extraordinary that it looked like art, like the ballerina who agonises every day in order to move weightlessly though our dreams. “The more effortless it appears that’s what we’re striving for. You’re striving for when it’s almost automatic, and it feels like you’re not having to do anything. So, yes. That was as close as I’ve gotten to the perfect race.”
Atlanta more than compensated for his missing the 400m in Barcelona due to food poisoning: a reversal with which he dealt manfully at the time (“it was only a race”), perhaps not so hard to do when victories are so easy to come by. Barcelona, then, is not a regret for him, nor is his failure to make the 200m team in Sydney (“I think that it all worked out in the end, because it really allowed me to be at the Olympics in Sydney and enjoy it. At Atlanta I was the centre of attention. In my last Olympics I was happy to relax.”) The one regret he admits to is his 1996 defeat by Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks in Oslo. “I was healthy. I understand why I lost that race, it was because of a stupid mistake on my part [with his start] and I should have known better. Those are the ones you wish you could run over again the ones when you’re unhealthy you just wish you hadn’t run.” Among these, presumably, is the idiotic $2-million 1997 match race with Donovan Bailey over 150m, in which Johnson pulled up with an injured quadricep (he has been plagued with this kind of problem throughout his career, but true to form has subdued to it his will). The “race” did little for his image especially when Bailey accused him of faking the injury or for the image of his sport. Indeed 1997 was a bad year all round for Johnson. He was beaten into fifth place at Crystal Palace, the last time he ran in Britain, and the hubris brigade suddenly scented blood. And in the end, when the jealousies, pettiness and suspicions have died away, the world will deal kindly with Michael Johnson. When he moves into the athletic afterlife of NBC TV broadcasting and motivational speaking, and when the 400m champion becomes just another good athlete with a perfectly trained knee action, that pumping, pulsing, pitter-pattering presence will be missed. As will that assurance, that impenetrability, that specialness: the attributes of greatness. And surely he will miss it all too? What could possibly compare with living inside a world illuminated by that golden gleam?
“You know, I’ve achieved all that I wanted in track, but I haven’t achieved what I want in life.”