"AFTER you have stared long enough into the dragon's eyes, there is nothing left to do but slay the dragon. For each of us, that dragon is the thing closest to the centre of our lives. It is our core, our ambition and our joy. For me, it is the perfect race." - Michael Johnson in his book, 'Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great Feats'.
That perfect race will never come for Michael Johnson, but he was close to a perfectionist in everything he did. Not just on track but in life, too. The closest he might have been to it on the track should be the Olympics 200 metres at Atlanta in 1996. There he had a slight stumble at the start and yet clocked 19.32 seconds for the 200 metres, an awesome world record that should defy the best for a long, long time to come.
"He put it in the refrigerator," complained Tim Montgomery in Edmonton recently, the sheer futility and frustration of chasing such an imposing record coming out so clearly in the observation of the American sprinter.
Maybe Michael Johnson will, from now on, run that 'perfect race' a thousand times and more in his mind as he gets down to his post-retirement life. But the towering Texan has gone out leaving two impossible-looking world records for others to chase and conquer, if possible, the one he clocked in Atlanta and the 43.18 he timed for the 400 metres in winning his fourth World championship gold in the event in Seville in 1999.
'Superman' and 'phenom' have been two of the superlatives used to describe the one and only athlete who won back to back 400m gold medals in Olympics and clinched an unprecedented 200-400 double in the World championships and Olympics. Both fit him well.
"I never wanted to be a celebrity," said Johnson on the eve of his final competitive race - the last race in Team USA colours - as the anchor for the 4x400m relay team in the Goodwill Games in Brisbane. "I wasn't comfortable with that. When you are growing up as the youngest of five, and your parents tell you, you're not special, you don't feel that way. So I always felt I wasn't special."
But, Johnson admitted that he also drew on the superman image to remind him of what it took to be unbeatable. When he ran the finals, in major championships, he always won. His collection from the Olympics is all gold; the same from the World championships. No one can match that record. Not even the great Carl Lewis.
"There are two household names in the history of track and field - Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis. I am in a position to be the third. It'll be the biggest show of the Olympics. I am going to be the man at these Olympics." Prophetic words these from the man as he geared up for the unprecedented task of winning the 200 and 400 at the Atlanta Olympics.
He won the 400 in an Olympic record of 43.49 and three days later, in front of 80,000 screaming fans, he crossed the line in the 200 metres in an incredible 19.32 seconds.
Four years later, the fans, over a 100,000, had roared moments before Michael Johnson stepped on to the track for the final of the 400 metres at Stadium Australia. But that was for Cathy Freeman, the aborigine who would be the heroine of a host nation that had so meticulously planned and conducted an extraordinary Olympics.
"The crowd was just buzzing, and there was so much energy in the stadium," Johnson would say of that memorable moment of the last Olympics, not about himself but about the scene that was when Freeman won for Australia its only gold from athletics. In a way, Johnson was robbed of that special moment, that moment when he would record a unique back-to-back gold haul and also make his final bow on the biggest stage of them all.
In a way, he had retired with the gold from the Sydney Olympics. He could not get a world record, though the fans and the media might have been expecting it. He always thought that there was a 42-plus one-lap in him. He did not want to aim for it in the Olympic year, though. He clocked 43.84 in Sydney.
This year was the long 'Golden Victory Lap Tour,' when he ran just the relays, that too at unconventional distances, some exhibition, some competitive. He interacted more with the children at clinics during the tour this year, not really worrying about the big race the next day. He was not enjoying big-time racing any more, he said. He did not have any more peaks to conquer. He could have continued in the same vein, if he wanted. He didn't.
He wound up just as he had started, with a victory, for Team USA. He had come into the big league through the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, with an ordinary-looking 20.54s for the 200, his slowest for the year, in rather cold conditions. The gold was his, however.
From then on, gold medals came by rote for Michael Johnson, though it took quite some time for him to come close to the kind of status that Carl Lewis enjoyed.
Johnson ended 1990 with a personal best of 44.21 at Sestriere, Italy and was ranked No 1 in both the 200m and 400m, the first man to achieve such a distinction. He was to repeat that effort on five more occasions in subsequent years. No athlete of our times has come anywhere near that.
The 200-400 combination has been a rare one for Michael Johnson after having briefly dabbled with the 100m also. Not that we cannot recall other runners in history having opted for such a combination. Briton Eric Liddell, of the 'Chariots of Fire' fame ran the combo in the 1924 Olympics, winning the bronze and the gold. But no one would be able to match what Johnson has achieved in terms of sub-20s and sub-44s. Not in the near future anyway.
"There's always been a stereotype," Johnson once said. "If you ran the 200, you also ran the 100, If you ran the 400, that was all you did."
Johnson made sure that if he ran the 400, he would run the 200, too, though his attempts to establish himself as the fastest human being met with scorn and taunts from men like Canadian Donovan Bailey and fellow American Maurice Greene. Not just that; he suffered injuries in trying to challenge these sprint champions. He almost ruined his World championship chances in 1997 by running that ill-advised challenge race with Bailey in Toronto over 150 metres.
Then, last year, in the US Olympic trials, he and Greene pulled up with injuries in their showdown in the 200 metres. To Greene, it was supposed to be a rehearsal for the real thing, the Sydney Olympics; for Johnson, it was the real thing. In the end, the showdown went 'kaput' at the turn.
The 'Waco Express,' to use his nickname, would have been better off without such showdowns. For someone who clocked a 19.32 for the 200, such duels were unnecessary bravados. As it turned out, the injury he suffered at Sacramento, during the 2000 Olympic trials, had more to do with the imbalance in his hips. He had suffered because of it in 1996 before the Atlanta Games, at the Toronto skydome in 1999 in that ill-fated showdown with Bailey, again at the 1999 US championships and in Europe before the Seville World championships.
"Over the last 10 years my reputation has been built on pressure and running against all comers. Over the last six weeks that's all been forgotten. They say he runs away from challenges," Johnson told Associated Press Track Writer, Bert Rosenthal, who recently retired, in August, 1999, apparently referring to the taunts he had to endure from Greene. "I didn't like sympathy. I didn't like people saying Michael is hurt. I didn't want to cry about my injuries."
Injury had bothered him in 1988 when he failed to qualify from the US Olympic trials, finishing seventh in the 400 heats. He did not finish the 200, breaking his fibula and then missing the rest of the summer season. But it was not an injury that laid him low in the Barcelona Olympics. It was food poisoning, a rotten prawn to be precise, prior to the Games, at Salamanca, Spain, where he won a 200 in 19.91. He and his agent, Brad Hunt, were violently ill after having savoured the prawn dish.
The food poisoning left Johnson weak and eventually led to a sixth-place finish in the 200m semis of the Olympics. He did come back and run the third leg of the gold-medal-winning 4x400m relay team, but that was small consolation for missing out on the individual 200.
Thus it was that Johnson had to wait till the Atlanta Games in 1996 for his first individual medal in the Olympics, though he was around till then for about eight years. Atlanta, of course, confirmed his status as the superman of athletics. With Carl Lewis bowing out, the focus shifted fully towards Johnson to the envy of lesser men.
In Atlanta, he won the 400 metres with the widest margin of victory (0.92s) in Olympics since 1896, with nearly 10 metres to spare. The man to come second was Roger Black of Britain. "I can't believe that I am an Olympic champion," he told Black as the runners waited near the press conference room. "And I always respected you."
"That to me showed the mark of the man," Black said. "He never ever under-estimated the rest of us. And that for me is where he has my respect. Because he respected the 400 metres, he respected who does the 400 metres. It's hard."
Then, Johnson won the 200 metres with 0.36s to spare from Frankie Fredericks. That was the widest margin ever for the distance at the global level since Jesse Owens beat team-mate Mack Robinson by 0.4s in the 1936 Olympics. Johnson himself had left Fredericks behind by 0.33s in the 1991 World championships in Tokyo and then duplicated that margin while winning the Worlds in Gothenburg in 1995. The man just behind, Fredericks again.
That happened to be his eighth race in seven days and yet he went after Italian Pietro Mennea's world record of 19.72. In the event, Johnson clocked 19.79s, equalling the sixth best then on the all-time chart.
Mennea's long-standing record was bound to fall. And it did in Atlanta during the US Olympic trials when Johnson clocked 19.66s. Less than two months later, at the Olympics, he shattered it beyond recognition, the widest margin by which a 200 world record had been bettered in more than 60 years.
"That's not a time. It sounds like my dad's birthday," said Ato Boldon of that phenomenal 19.32.
Johnson's 43.18 also evokes awe among his rivals, but not so much as the 19.32. Perhaps, he could have put the 400 record also beyond the reach of mere mortals in the Sydney Olympics. Many of us had looked forward to that. But as he himself once said world records don't come as easily as that, not when the scribes want them anyway.
"I never put limits to my own ability. I always thought I could run 42 seconds... eventually I will run 42. But my next goal is Sydney. I don't want to go in there thinking about retaining my 200 and 400 and looking for a world record also," said Johnson in Seville.
By May, 2000, he was saying: "The priority this year is winning at the Olympics, 200 and 400. I don't care what the time is."
The time was 43.84s, not bad at all, but just about par by his standards. "I am thankful, it is over," he said in Sydney. "It's been a long day today. There's been a lot of pressure. I had the opportunity to make history, to have an Olympic career with no bronze, no silver, only golds. This is my last major competition. I was here to defend my last individual race in the Olympic Games. This Olympics is very special because it is my last. Nothing can take anything away from Atlanta. Sydney has been very enjoyable."
And as he took a "victory walk", the other day at the ANZ Stadium in Brisbane, after having knelt and said a prayer following the relay victory, Johnson seemed to enjoy every moment of it. He touched the hands of those hundreds who were stretching out to him from the stands. throwing his shoes into the crowd. "I will miss the sport because it has been such a big part of my life. I am sad, not so much that my career is ending, because that was a decision I consciously made, I am a little sad that this year is going to end because I have had a great time. I am looking forward to my retirement," he said.
"I have got my hands full with him now," said Johnson, pointing to his infant son, Sebastian. Well, that is going to be a lot different from running the splits that the coach had fixed or preserving yourself while doing the 200-400 double in an Olympics.
Farewell MJ, there will never be another like you. Track will miss you.
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