What I've learned after three days at the track Worlds

Lauryn Williams nabbed the silver Monday night in the 100 meters. AP

OSAKA, Japan -- Four truths from the 11th World Track and Field Championships, now three days old in steamy Osaka, Japan.

1) I want Lauryn Williams on my team. Any team. Dodgeball. Snowshoeing. World-class global championship sprinting. That last one, especially, because the tenacious, 5-foot-3 Williams is really good at it. If medals are awarded, she's probably going to get one, like the silver she won in the 100 meters Monday night in Osaka, Japan. In an agonizingly close finish that left the top six finishers separated by just seven hundredths of a second and required five long minutes to decide, Williams was edged at the line by 2004 Olympic 200-meter champion Veronica Campbell of Jamaica. "I'm not at all disappointed with the silver medal,'' said Williams after the race.

She shouldn't be; if ever there was a silver medal lined with gold, this was it. Consider: Williams came to Osaka having run no faster than 11.11 seconds for 100 meters this season, a whopping two-tenths of a second slower than her personal best. Eleven U.S. women had run faster. Her last two seasons had been sabotaged by a nagging hamstring injury and her inability to work it back to health while coping with the demands of running as a professional athlete. In late June, she had lowered her own expectations. "Baby steps,'' she said, minus the unbridled joy that marked most of her previous interactions with the media. "I'm just trying to put one foot in front of the other.''

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She seemed unlikely to contend at the worlds, where Campbell and Torri Edwards of the U.S. were the favorites. U.S. media stalked the interview area for the semifinals, thinking that the world champion might be eliminated early. But here there was history. In 2004, Williams was an NCAA 100-meter champion at Miami who finished third at the Olympic Trials. She should have been happy just to get a plane ticket to Athens and she definitely should have been burned out from the long season. Instead, she won a silver medal behind the now-MIA Yuliya Nesterenko of Belarus. A year later she barely qualified for the U.S. team that would compete at the world championships in Helsinki, and then stunned Campbell by winning the gold medal.

Yet we never learn. Minutes before the gun, I shouted to a colleague in the press area at Osaka Nagai Stadium, "Only two people can win this race,'' meaning Campbell and Edwards. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I will never underestimate Williams again. She ran 11.01 seconds, her fastest time of the year, and under the most pressure, and after four rounds.

Write it down: She will make the U.S. Olympic team next summer and contend for the gold in Beijing. Because that's what she does.

2) Lance Brauman can coach. He just has to enjoy the results in a very unusual way. The former University of Arkansas sprint assistant trains both 100-meter world champions: Tyson Gay and Campbell, who are part of Brauman's group in Fayetteville, Ark. But since November Brauman has been incarcerated at a minimum-security prison in Texarkana, Texas. He was found guilty of mail fraud and embezzlement while coaching at Barton County Community College in Great Bend, Kansas, and sentenced to 366 days in prison.

Brauman guided Gay and Campbell through their championship seasons by giving them a notebook with a year's worth of workouts and talking regularly with them on the phone. He was usually able to get in front of the television in the prison to watch Gay or Campbell race, but Gay's 100-meter victory was available live only on streaming video, which Brauman could not access.

Instead, he called his wife, Kim, five minutes after the race. At the time, Kim was in a hospital in Kansas, with the couple's three-year-old daughter, Jayci, and many other family members. Kim's father had recently undergone cardiac bypass surgery. "We tried our best to not yell and scream,'' Kim Brauman wrote in an email, "but we were all very excited.''

Lance Brauman will be released from prison on Tuesday morning at 6:30 a.m. Kim and Jayci will be there to meet him. He will spend the next month in a halfway house in Orlando, Fla. Kim expects that Lance will be able to watch Gay's 200-meter final on Thursday morning, U.S. time. Wallace Spearmon, another Brauman pupil, is also in that race.

3) Allyson Felix is the oldest 21-year-old in Osaka. She is barely old enough to buy a drink, yet she is running at the world championships for the third time, in addition to one Olympics. In 2003, she was a gifted, but tired recent high school graduate who failed to reach the 200-meter final at the Paris worlds. A year later, she took a 200-meter silver behind Campbell in Athens and in '05 she won the 200 in Helsinki.

Many things have changed. Experiences no longer widen her eyes. Her close friend, Justin Gatlin, is fighting an eight-year doping suspension. "This time I feel like I'm here to do a job,'' she said Monday at the U.S. team hotel.

Don't get me -- or Felix -- wrong. She's plenty happy. But this is an athlete whom I first met when she was a senior at tiny Los Angeles Baptist High, and now she is clearly a professional grownup with major goals. One of them: Break 21 seconds in the 200 meters. Her personal best is 22.11 and she can definitely get there. Another: Win multiple golds here in Osaka. After getting dumped from the U.S. 4X100-meter relay on the morning of the race in Helsinki, she expects to run both that relay and -- after ripping through a 49.70 400 meters in Stockholm and beating defending world champion Sanya Richards -- the 4X400 meters. She qualified for the 100 meters here, but dropped out when she wasn't happy with her progress in the event. "Things just weren't coming together,'' she said. "My start. I just can't get it down.''

Richards has already petitioned to change the Olympic track and field schedule next year to allow an athlete to double in the 200 and 400 meters. Felix might do the same. This adds another layer to an intriguing rivalry between two young athletes (Richards is just 22) who, by the way, are not close friends.

4) Alan Webb needs to rediscover his `A' game to win a medal in Wednesday's 1,500-meter final. Let's be fair: Webb has had an unbelievable summer and whatever he does in Osaka should be regarded as gravy. He won a Golden League 1,500 meters. He ran 3:46.91 to break Steve Scott's revered U.S. mile record. He scorched a 1:43.8 for 800 meters.

But he also wants a championship medal, and two rounds here have only re-affirmed what Webb already knew: The 1,500 meters is a gnarly place to get one. In the first round, Webb ran a tactically solid race and advanced easily. Never mind 18-year-old Kenyan prodigy Asbel Kiprop's staredown and finger wag. Monday night in the semifinals, Webb dropped back to last place and tried to circle the field in the final 400 meters, getting the fifth and final automatic qualifying spot only with a desperate sprint in the last 100 meters.

"I tried to do something I don't like, be in the back for the whole time, and it almost cost me a spot,'' says Webb. "It was close. I was trying to count guys.'' Webb didn't hang long enough with the media to explain whether he felt good enough to move more decisively or run closer to the front. (And that's fine; he's got a cool down to do, and you can be sure he'll talk deep into the night after the final).

His struggle was in contrast to his U.S. teammate Bernard Lagat (a Kenyan expatriate and 2004 Olympic silver medalist), who blew past the entire field in the final 150 meters of the first heat. It was the type of decisive, explosive move that inspires confidence for the final. Defending world champion Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain (via Morocco), made a similar move in Webb's heat. They were the only two runners who made qualifying look easy. The Webb who beat France's Mehdi Baala in July had the tools to make a run at the medals here on Wednesday night.

Fitness is a fragile thing. It's possible that Webb lost just a little while healing a minor hamstring tweak in late July and early August. But it's also possible that he's churning through a difficult mental process and that he'll run brilliantly Wednesday night. In the end, nothing has changed. As former U.S. Olympian Bob Kennedy told me two weeks ago: "To win a gold medal in the 1,500, you have to be tactically perfect. To win any medal at all, you have to be tactically almost perfect.''

And things are even more trying than usual: After a roller derby-rough first semifinal (Lagat's, not Webb's), Baala was disqualified, but two others were instated. The final will be run with a bloated field of 14 runners, instead of the usual 12. It will be a chaotic race. Webb suspected it wouldn't be easy to win a medal. And it won't.