Bringing It All Back Home

As if on cue, his cellphone rings: a JAAA official looking to clarify what should be done with Dunkley. "You need to send this man a letter stating that if he doesn't respond, that you'll have to hear him in absentia and you'll sentence him anyhow," Elliott says into his phone. "Because the IAAF needs to know what we're doing.... Anyhow, we want to ban him for the two years. The one thing I want to find out about, I understand he had problems in the NCAA before. If that is so, we'll ban him for life."

Dunkley competed in the U.S. for East Carolina and won the 2003 NCAA indoor 60-meter championship before being stripped of it for undisclosed reasons. During that time he also worked with expatriate Jamaican coach Trevor Graham, training in the same doping-tainted group as Montgomery and Marion Jones. Graham is now banned from coaching in the U.S.

Elliott was part of the early wave of sprinters who made studying and competing in the U.S. a Jamaican rite of passage. But when Asafa Powell decided in 2001 to attend Kingston's University of Technology (UTech), that narrative underwent a profound shift. The most prominent Jamaican-born sprinters who have tested positive, going back to Canada's Johnson in 1988 and Barcelona gold medalist Linford Christie of Great Britain in '99, had worked overseas—innocents, it seems, who came under the influence of corrupt foreign coaches. "I am going to stay in Jamaica," Powell declared in 2004, "and beat the world naturally."

Many of the new Jamaican stars—including Bolt, Fraser and Walker—spent the last four years training and studying in Kingston. The island's Olympic delegation went off to Beijing with a new mind-set. "F--- the Americans," Elliott says. "That is what we thought. Who the hell are they? We're better than them."

Lewis is a perfect target for such invective, and when Elliott is asked what, specifically, he finds so unfair in Lewis's statements, he begins by calling Lewis "full of s---" and "an imbecile." But then it hits him that he hasn't answered the question—and, really, can't. "Don't get me wrong," Elliott says finally. "I don't trust any of my athletes either."

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 17

ONCE SEVEN of its runners—Fraser, Powell, Walker, Nesta Carter, Michael Frater, Sherone Simpson and Shericka Williams—won medals in Beijing, the upstart MVP Track & Field Club became the new power in Jamaican sprinting. But when coach Stephen Francis hung out MVP's shingle at UTech in 2001, none of the top Jamaican talent headed there. "We got the bottom of the barrel," says Paul Francis, Stephen's brother and the women's coach at UTech. "Asafa was no star in high school; Sherone couldn't win a race. Shelly-Ann? Oh, God. Shelly-Ann would get her ass whipped every single time."

Finally running in spikes instead of bare feet, Fraser showed promise at Wolmer's, but she didn't win much until age 17, when she took a second-tier 100 meters in 11.73 at Champs, Jamaica's equivalent of the Super Bowl. More than 35,000 fans cram into the National Stadium each spring for these high school championships. But then Shelly-Ann got lazy: She spent the next year eating fast food and fading in race after race. After losing a scholarship offer to Alabama because of poor math scores, she bumped into Paul Francis one night at a KFC. He persuaded her to give UTech a try.

"You can never predict how quickly they will explode into something special," Francis says. "But if you asked me two years ago, 'Are you recruiting her because you think she'll be an Olympic champion?' I'd have said, 'Are you crazy?'"

Thunder rumbles; the sun blazes. The tidy UTech campus hasn't changed much since 2001: The buildings are still low-slung, the track needs mowing, the training rooms are cramped. Francis stands in a parking lot near the track, waiting for Fraser to return from her first day back in class. He knows what track people say: Bolt may have improved by .34 of a second in a year, but he had been considered a mind-blowing talent since age 15. Fraser shaved nearly a half second off her personal best (11.31 to 10.85) from June 2007 to the Jamaican national championships 12 months later—and she was no Bolt.