Waiting for the world to explode

It comes right at the beginning of the athletics schedule, which always seems a little odd, like getting the gunfight before you have even finished a mouthful of popcorn. This morning's men's 100 metres final is, by its nature, the focal event of the track competition, although it may not necessarily be the most dramatic or enjoyable. But in all sport there is nothing like those seconds before the start of the Olympic 100m final, when a hush settles over the whole stadium as eight athletes wait in their blocks for the world to explode around them.

A novel could be written about what happens in the next 10 seconds. The number of its chapters would depend on which author - or ghostwriter - you talked to. But every microsecond would have a paragraph of its own.

The nuances are countless. But for John Smith, the coach of Maurice Greene, the world record holder, and Ato Boldon, who has been Greene's nearest rival in recent seasons, the business of preparing a 100m champion is to identify and isolate the individual phases of the race, to work on them and then to eliminate them from the athlete's mind.

"Objectively, we work on different phases," Smith says. "It's like in the theatre. You rehearse pieces of stuff and put them together and see what you've got. Then you go back and critique it. Every day you make a new discovery. But, when Maurice is racing, he's not thinking about the separate phases. He's not thinking about anything at all. He's feeling."

Smith, a former Olympic 400m runner, based his analysis of the 100m on the pioneering work of Tom Tellez, the Uni versity of Houston coach who trained Carl Lewis and Leroy Burrell. "Tellez broke the race up into reaction time, followed by acceleration, maintenance and deceleration. That was the first model I had. I didn't know anything about velocity or degrees of movement. That was stuff that I would learn later on."

But first Smith refined the Tellez formula. "After reaction time you'd have block clearance, drive phase, transition, maintenance. I wanted to get rid of the deceleration phase, the last 20 metres. I wanted to be able to go past that point and be able to maintain oneself so you could eliminate a phase. Why slow down? If you plan to slow down, you'll slow down. So I looked at not planning to slow down and to see if it was possible to hold the maintenance phase throughout the rest of the race."

His quarter-miler's mentality led him even further into tactical thinking and into challenging the idea of hitting a maximum speed at the halfway point. "Instead of trying to run so fast in the middle, why not string together some conservative marks throughout the race? Instead of trying to run one 10-metre section in 0.83sec, which is 12.3 metres per second, and then die horribly at the end of the race, why not put together four or five 0.85s and see what kind of time that will give you? It's like you only have so much gas in your car and, if you punch the accelerator too hard, you're going to run out of gas."

To Mike McFarlane, the British sprinter who finished fifth in the 1984 final in Los Angeles and now coaches Dwain Chambers, the basic principle is "to get to 50 [metres] in good pace. But each sprinter has a different perspective." With Chambers the plan is to run the first 30 to 40 metres in "driving mode", before switching to "running mode".

Between individuals, he says, the numbers vary. "Some pick up their pace between 40 and 70 metres, some between 60 and 90, others 30 and 60. Some might have an excellent early change of pace. Some hold their speed well, others get there with them and have a late change of pace. That's what makes the 100 metres so interesting. But as long as the runner is fit, then once the race has started 70 per cent of it is in his head."

The metaphysical dimension is the most demanding part of the coach's job, according to Smith. "An athlete is always in a subjective mode," he says. "And the coach is trying to take the objective philosophy connected to their subjective philosophy and to have some means of communication between the two. Data is good for a conversation like this but out there I want them to open themselves up. Our whole practice is based on getting to a point where you can get out of yourself, get out of your worries, get out of your car, get out of your money, get out of all the other stuff and get into you, so that you can do what you want to do. It's a non-judgmental mindset that allows you to get into that little area that's all yours and be as creative as you want."

He began working with Boldon in 1994 and with Greene the following year and stresses the differences between them -differences of physique and of background. "They weigh the same and they're the same height but they're built completely differently. They have different levers. The feet, femur, from ankle to knee, from knee to hip, from hip to shoulder, all different sizes. They have to move different parts of their bodies in order to accomplish the same thing."

The task is complicated by the fact that, whereas Greene was a runner from the start, Boldon grew up in Trinidad playing soccer. "Ato didn't get any real training until he was 17 or 18 years old. Maurice played a little gridiron football but he's been a track man since he was eight years old. That's the difference. Ato can take a soccer ball and look at the net and he can feel the sweet spot in his foot when he hits it. There's a connection. Maurice can feel the sweet spot when he runs. He can feel that movement under him when he has to explode. And the faster he runs, the more precise he is. Ato is learning that. It takes years."

When Greene ran 9.79sec in Athens last year, it meant that the world record had been reduced by exactly one second over the course of the century, having stood in 1900 to Luther Cary at 10.8sec. "You have to live in the unknown, beyond the edges," Smith says. "The ideas I have about how fast man can run are beyond what we're doing right now. It doesn't make sense to everybody but I'm not here to perpetuate the status quo. When people say, 'That's impossible,' I say, 'You're right. I live in a land of impossibilities.' When you get into the areas where we are now, there's no script written."

The runners, for all the planning and the preparation of their coaches, are not machines. However powerful their focus, they cannot help but be affected by their surroundings. "In the early rounds they're more aware of who's around them," Mike McFarlane says. "They're more likely to be running to make a statement, to let the others know they're around and to give themselves a confidence boost. But in the final it's heads down, eyes down and the only thing that matters is to execute everything you've learnt to the best of your ability."

When the eight finalists take their places today, each one will need to find his own way of reconciling the objective data of the training track with the subjective impressions of the moment. For some, there will be not enough time to think; for others, too much. "It's a battle," McFarlane concludes. "It always is. And it seems to last a long time."