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Getting better with age
Posted: Saturday February 05, 2000 11:24 AM
NEW YORK -- Many of USA Track and Field's tenured runners thought to be a little too long in the tooth proved at the Millrose Games that they still have some bite after all. Consider exhibits A through C: Johnny Gray, 39, won the men's 800 meters in 1:49.88; Joetta Clark Diggs, 37, won the women's 800 in 2:04.79; and Regina Jacobs, 36, won the women's mile in 4:24.04. Gray says he plans to compete in his sixth U.S. Olympic Trials this summer with hopes of making his fifth Olympic team. He also plans an assault on several masters (40 and over) records after turning 40 in June: "Older runners know how to prepare for big races better than the younger guys," says Gray, who won a bronze medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. "If you run every race, so you can make all the money on the European circuit, you lose training. My advice to the younger runners is, spend more time training and less time chasing the money. An older runner who's dedicated to training and peaking at the right time, I like his chances." Clark Diggs, a New Jersey native, was a 14-year-old high school sophomore when she ran her in her first Millrose Games in 1977. She finished third in the 800 meters that year and has competed in 24 of the last 25 Millrose meets. This year marked the first time she raced against her 22-year-old sister Hazel, a three-time NCAA champ at Florida who placed third here in 2:04.92. "Being willing to race that much is not as hard as being able to train," says Clark, whose father, Joe Clark, a renowned educator, was the subject of the movie Lean On Me. "On the bad days you just say, 'Remember how good this sport is to you? So treat this like a good day and go to work.'" Jacobs, the 1997 Worlds silver medalist at 1,500 meters, anticipated one reporter's query by asking, "Is this an age question?" Then she answered it. "You know, in Europe, older bodies are really sexy. I think it's about time people over here start thinking that way. In their mid-30s, most runners should be in their primes. You can't necessarily get faster then, but you can get stronger and have greater stamina. And you've got a competitive advantage because you're more mature." It has been nearly 13 years since Jacobs sought a sports psychologist to help her overcome both a fear of having runners come up on her shoulder and an impatience that made her sweaty as she waited on the starting line for public-address announcers to finish introducing the runners. "I'm still learning a lot of things," she said. "I'm still working on stride, arms, learning how to eat right. These are things I should've learned when I was a kid."
How to beat GreeneIt was no surprise that Maurice Greene won the 60 meters at Millrose in 6.45 seconds, the fastest time in the world so far in this still-brief indoor season. But the man who won both the 100 and 200 meters at the '99 World Championships admitted afterwards that he wouldn't mind losing every race for the rest of the year if he knew he would win the 100 meters at the Olympics in Sydney. Some of the top names in sprinting, all former Olympians, offered these thoughts when asked how to approach racing against Greene:
Brian Cazeneuve is a Sports Illustrated writer-reporter who covers Olympic sports for the magazine. Keep an eye out for his Sydney 2000 Mailbag.
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