Primal Scream

Of course they cried out. Transitions are always painful. Birth, death...lord, adolescence is a transition, and this was as anguished, as irrevocable. The eight Hailing sprinters in the men's 100-meter final at the world track and field championships on Sunday in G�teborg, Sweden, had just passed 70 meters in the V-shaped formation of a flight of geese. Let's say Canada geese, for it was Canada's Donovan Bailey at the point of the V and Canada's Bruny Surin close behind, battling Trinidad's Ato Boldon for second.

Bailey's head was bobbing, and his stride felt about to go out of control, but he still saw, far to his left, Britain's Linford Christie, the '92 Olympic and '93 world champion. Saw that Christie was fading.

Bailey screamed. At the moment that the transit was made from one world's fastest human to the next, the new champion roared something awful.

"That scream took me totally out of my game," said Boldon, a senior at UCLA who had won the NCAA 200 meters in June. He gave Bailey an astounded look. "I was relaxed until then," Boldon said. "Blame my youth and inexperience." Boldon didn't exactly disintegrate. Bailey won in 9.97 seconds, with Surin close behind at 10.03, but Boldon finished third, also in 10.03.

Not that Bailey had screamed as a tactical move. "I was mad," he said. "I knew I was in front, but I'd run a technically bad race. I was overstriding." Bailey yelled partly to regain command. "A few choice words," he said. What were they? Better, he suggested, to use asterisks and ampersands.

With 10 meters to go, as if the loss of his mantle was unbearable, Christie, too, screamed. He had been the favorite, the master of the nerves that make sprinters flinch in defining races. Christie is 35 and tired, not of sprinting but of the tabloid turmoil that sprinting success has brought into his life. He had announced he would skip next summer's Olympics. This was to be his last great odds-beating triumph.

But in his semifinal 2� hours earlier, Christie felt a twinge in his right hamstring. He eased in fourth and limped to treatment. He considered withdrawing, but he had willed away tics and twinges before. "As an athlete," he had said, dismissively, "you're always injured."

Now, in the final's last desperate strides, the twinge returned as a vicious cramp. The muscle in the back of Christie's thigh locked his calf against his butt. Of course it couldn't stay there. In the next instant, the more powerful quadriceps on the front of Christie's thigh straightened his knee and tore holy hell out of his cramped ham. Christie's scream contained his injury, his loss, his rage at the manner of his passing. So loud were the wails and groans coming from this race that photographers near the finish felt they faced a cave of winds.

Christie stayed on his feet to finish sixth in 10.12 but went face-first to the track at once. A stretcher was brought out, and it was not hard to imagine it a shield.

His conqueror was past him by then, savoring a victory lap. If ever a man has come to sprinting prominence on his own terms, it's Bailey. Born in Jamaica 27 years ago, he moved to Canada at 13 and embarked upon a life free of world-class mania. He played basketball at Sheridan College in Ontario, a six-foot-tall power forward. "Going nowhere," he puts it. He means in sport, for he was a fine student.