SUPER MICHAEL

Michael Johnson conquered the Worlds with three blazing gold medal runs

by KENNY MOORE

from Sports Illustrated August 21, 1995

Halfway through the men's 400-meter final at the world track and field championships in Goteborg, Sweden, last week, the leaders were even, making their differences seem mere matters of style. World-record holder Butch Reynolds, whose 43.29 has stood sinc e 1988, ran so tall and so long that Michael Johnson, with his lower knees and shorter gait, seemed a maxed-out trotter trying to stay with a thoroughbred.

But then, passing 200 meters in 21.3 seconds, the trotter began to sprint, and he showed a marveling world (and a devastated Reynolds) that he is the modern incarnation of Jesse Owens.

Owens, the hero of the 1936 Olympics, said he ran as if the track were the top of a hot stove; he tried to snatch up each foot the instant he put it down. Johnson, burning through the third 100 meters in 10.45, perfectly embodied Owens's technique. Then i n the stretch, running away, his lead yawning past six meters, Johnson showed that he has added an implacable, muscular endurance to Owens's mechanics.

When Johnson was a single stride from the finish, the clock on the infield to his left still hadn't reached 43 seconds. Johnson didn't look at it. Reynolds tried to. "I couldn't see it," he would say, "but Michael was so far ahead " Reynolds was sick with fear. "For seven years the record has been a part of life, a part of me."

Only when he had crossed the finish line did Johnson allow himself a sidelong glance at the clock. Later, many watching the slow-motion replay of this moment would cry out in surprise: He wanted that world record. He did not quite get it. His 43.39 was .1 of a second shy, allowing Reynolds perhaps another week, perhaps another year of queasy stewardship.

In any other athlete a simple look at the clock, a passing betrayal of ambition, would hardly be cause for wonder. But in Michael Johnson we have a champion as remarkable for his containment as for his speed, his range and his durability.

The 400 he ran, for example, was intrinsically superior to the world record. Johnson had to run three rigorous 400s (45.49, 45.15 and 44.90) to make the final, while in 1988 Reynolds had gone to Zurich rested, as had his opponents. The men behind Reynolds in Zurich had better times than those behind Johnson in Goteborg, proof of the drain of the rounds in Sweden.

Johnson had not coasted to a stop after the 400 before the dean of European track experts, Robert Pariente of the French sports daily, L'Equipe, was on his feet. "Mon Dieu, 10.45 seconds for the third 100! On the turn!" he said. "Impossible." Johnson had left his opponents so fast that he eased the sting

of their defeat. Bronze medalist Greg Haughton of Jamaica (44.56) and seventh-placer Roger Black of Britain (45.28) held up their heads and said they were honored to be in Johnson's wake.

Johnson trotted a victory lap, his satisfaction evident but measured. In part this was because he had to run a heat for the 200 meters the next morning, but it was also because Johnson is simply not given to dramatic displays. This, not so curiously, stru ck a nerve in the man who has given track wondrous theater.

Carl Lewis, before flying home to Houston to tend the strained hamstring that forced him to withdraw from the long jump, spoke with Ian Thomsen of the International Herald Tribune and said, "This world championships, it's boring. The electricity is not th ere. There's no buzz, no passionate missions. There's something missing." Thomsen pried out of Lewis that the missing element was ... Lewis, or a suitable heir. "If that's it, that's it," said Lewis. "The one American they're trying to build up, Michael J ohnson, he doesn't have it. He's not doing anything for them."

But many athletes set goals and work toward them for reasons other than making themselves immortal, or even famous. Five years ago, when Johnson, not long out of Baylor, became the only man to be ranked No. 1 at both the 200 and the 400, he began hearing that he had a chance to brand himself on our

collective imagination. Johnson, who was called a nerd in high school in Dallas for his neat, scholarly, organized ways, found that possibility at best amusing and at worst distracting, which would never do. Even now, asked if his unprecedented double a t the worlds made history or satisfied personal goals, he said, "Well, I happened to make it my goal to do something no one else has done, and that turned out to make history."

And to win the Goteborg crowd. "The people supported me before I'd even run a heat here," Johnson said. "One kid kept yelling, 'Magic, Magic '" Once I figured out that he meant me, I was touched. I also think it was a great championships."

Had he stuck around, even Lewis might have found these worlds mildly diverting. In the women's 400-meter hurdles, the perfectly matched Kim Batten and Tonja Buford, both of the U.S., did battle with hardly a thought of a record and in the process shattere d a big one. Batten (previous best: 53.72) and Buford(53.63), great friends, found themselves inseparable as they swept over the ninth hurdle and into the stretch. Buford had led early, but Batten had her by afoot over the last hurdle. Yet Buford has ofte n been the stronger finisher.

"If she'd won, I couldn't have been disappointed," Batten said later.

"I leaned as best I could lean," said Buford.

Batten just leaned better. Both staggered over the line too spent to react to the crowd. As the thunder grew, Batten was the first to sense what it might mean. She turned to the clock and was astounded to see it stopped at 52.61. "Tonja," shrieked Batten, "we broke the world record!"

Buford was timed in 52.62, so both women had eclipsed the standard of 52.74 established by Sally Gunnell of Britain in 1993. Each chopped more than a full second from her best. "I said to myself last night, if I set a personal record, I'd be happy with br onze," said Batten.

If Lewis were not so jaded, he might have seen the 110-meter high hurdles race of the U.S.'s Allen Johnson. Johnson clobbered the third and seventh hurdles in the final but was uncannily unaffected, staying ahead of Britain's Tony Jarrett. Then Johnson hi t the last barrier so hard that his knees buckled. Miraculously, he recovered to win in 13.00, within striking distance of the world record of 12.91.

Or, if Lewis's sense of drama demanded the spectacle of old enemies slashing at each other anew, he couldn't have looked away from the women's 200 last Thursday, though he might have wanted to. The world 100-meter champion, Gwen

Torrence of the U.S., ran a spectacular race, winning by more than three meters in 21.77 over Jamaica's 35-year-old Merlene Ottey. But as Torrence was telling a TV interviewer that she had been spooked by the theft of her shoes before the race and feare d sabotage, the scoreboard flashed the results. Instead of leading the list, Torrence's name was at the bottom, accompanied by a dread dq for disqualified. Replays had shown that she ran at least three steps on the inner lane line in the latter part of th e turn.

The reaction by several of Torrence's competitors was unconcealed delight. Torrence has been much disliked since stating her unsupported belief, after finishing fourth in the Barcelona Olympic 100, that some of those who had beaten her were aided by drugs . What Ottey said in Goteborg evened the score.

It was inevitable, then, that Ottey and Torrence would meet one last time, anchoring their nations' 4x100-meter relay teams on Sunday. They even got their respective batons in step with each other. Then Torrence outran Ottey by more than a meter. Pleasant ries were not exchanged.

If Lewis could be moved by the poignant return of a beloved champion, he should have been there to see the 800 meters of Cuba's Ana Fidelia Quirot. The 1992 Olympic bronze medalist, who lost only one race between 1988 and '90, had suffered hideous burns o ver her chest, neck and arms in a kerosene fire in January 1993. While near death in the hospital, she gave premature birth to a daughter, who died 10 days later. By the end of that year she was back running. No passionate missions? When Quirot presented herself at the start of the 800 final, the scars on her chest and legs shone dully in the Scandinavian sun.

At the gun Quirot took shelter from the wind behind Meredith Rainey of the U.S. and Kelly Holmes of Britain. Off the last turn, she drew wide, and there it was, the old stride, the old irresistible kick. Quirot won going away in 1:56.11(a victory aided, s he granted, by the disqualification of Mozambique's world champ, Maria Mutola, in the semi for another galling lane-line violation). "This is," Quirot said, simply and tearfully, "the happiest day of my life."

If he could have stood all that boredom, Lewis would have seen that it was left to Michael Johnson to define the worlds with the 200 meters. Indeed, Lewis would have found himself agreeing with Johnson's manager, Brad Hunt, who for some time has felt that Johnson's stone face might be effective in competition but has given the wrong impression of the man.

"He is purposely isolated from his competitors," said Hunt. "He's never going to allow them inside. But he is so focused he almost isolates himself from his fans. At the end of last season, I said to Michael, 'You need to show the audience how much you en joy what you do.'"

Johnson took this under advisement. In the final yards of June's U.S. national 400, which he won in 43.66, he tried a little vaudevillian wave, as if he were shaking a straw hat, but that just offended Reynolds, who finished second, and prompted cries tha t Johnson might have thrown away a world record by not running through the finish. No, waving didn't seem right. Johnson determined to let the moment suggest the gesture.

The 200-meter final at Goteborg had everything, even disbelieving opponents. Britain's John Regis said he had never been able to run one fast 200 the day after a 400, let alone three prelims and a final over two days. So every evening Johnson had turned h imself over to a massage therapist for up to two hours to soothe away the stiffness. But his real secret, if it can be called that, is a lifetime of hard workouts done with exceptionally short rests.

The day was warm, the crowd expectant. As the finalists went to the set position, Johnson stared so sharply at a point in front of him that you expected later to find there a puddle of melted urethane. Yet at the gun he seemed to show the weight of all he had borne. He was out behind Brazil's Robson Da Silva and Namibia's Frank Fredericks. Then Johnson simply rolled past, not as a thunderbolt but as a gathering storm. He was a meter ahead off the turn and running with full power. He held his shoulders low in the last meters, and his down turning grimace showed that he was flat-out.

He won, looked again for the clock, saw that the time was 19.79, equal to his best but still .07 of a second from Pietro Mennea's altitude-assisted world record of 19.72 set in 1979, and threw his head back in an instant's lament. "It was unbelievable to come so close twice," he would say. Then Johnson let his dominant emotions flood in. And what he did next should be where we depart these worlds.

Yes, Johnson would cruise a 44.12 leg in anchoring the U.S.'s 4x400 relay on the last day of the meet, when a cold wind bent the rushing birches and made you understand where you were and that it was time to go. Yes, Johnson's performances got the authori ties to look at accommodating his hoped-for double in Atlanta, although IAAF president Primo Nebiolo insisted Johnson could handle the 200 semi and the 400 final on the same day, saying, "If he wants to run backward, he could do it."

But the enduring image of Johnson in Goteborg should be his act after the 200. He looked at the crowd, spread his arms wide and collapsed backward in a child's gesture of exhaustion, relief and contentment. In that moment, spread-eagled and vulnerable, Jo hnson achieved all anyone, even Carl Lewis, could ask. This private man found a way to let us see exactly how much he enjoyed what he had done.