That clucking sound resounding across the Atlantic Ocean makes it clear just how deafening Michael Johnson’s footsteps have become in the 400 meters.
Britain’s top quarter-milers are so chicken about facing MJ before the Olympics they have pressured the promoter of the July 12 Grand Prix meet in London not to let him run the event there.
“The British athletes in the 400 feel it would be too severe a test,” said Tony Ward, spokesman for the British Athletic Association. “They think it would be psychologically a bit too big of a load to take into Atlanta (the Olympics).”
Translated, that means the Brits don’t want to have their butts kicked by Johnson, two-time world champion at 400 and winner of 52 straight races at the distance.
Johnson, who was to run a first-round heat of the 400 in the U.S. Olympic Trials here Saturday night, still expects to run in London.
“I don’t think there is anything to talk about,” he said. “We have a signed contract. I have always abided by everything I signed.”
The situation might come down to one of those farces so common among middle-distance runners on the Grand Prix circuit. Meet promoters sometimes have to run two races at the same distance to satisfy stars who want to duck each other, as happened with milers Noureddine Morceli of Algeria and Venuste Niyongabo of Burundi in France last month.
Perhaps Johnson should give his British rivals a handicap, like running 410 meters to their 400.
Paper tigers: For the second straight time, the International Amateur Athletic Federation has backed off a threat to apply its “contamination” rule to athletes who compete against a banned athlete in the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Heptathlete Gea Johnson is competing here despite having been suspended four years for steroid use in 1994. Johnson got an Arizona judge to issue an injunction allowing her participation in the trials.
A month ago, IAAF President Primo Nebiolo of Italy blustered, “I am very clear. If you compete against an athlete that is suspended, all the athletes who accept and compete with them will be immediately disqualified.”
That is exactly what Nebiolo had said before caving in at the 1992 trials, when suspended 400-meter runner Butch Reynolds received judicial relief from the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed him to compete.
In both cases, Nebiolo listened to reason instead of his own pompous rantings, realizing that the U.S. track federation had to obey decisions of U.S. courts and that penalizing other athletes was vindictive and senseless.
Were Johnson to earn one of the three places on the Olympic team, a long shot when she stood sixth after the first day of the heptathlon, it would cause far greater legal wrangling.
The IAAF was able to keep Reynolds from running at the Barcelona Games, for which he had qualified as a relay alternate. But it could have a much harder time keeping a U.S. athlete supported by U.S. courts from competing at an Olympics in the United States.
Johnson, 28, of Phoenix, had been the second-ranked U.S. heptathlete in 1989 and 1990.
Not gym dandy: Two of Romania’s leading gymnasts have physical problems that could limit their Olympic abilities.
Gina Gogean, winner of the vault and floor exercise at the recent world championships, had an emergency appendectomy Wednesday. Romanian coach Octavian Belu was uncertain about whether Gogean would recover in time to compete in Atlanta.
Lavinia Milosovici, vault and floor exercise gold medalist at Barcelona in 1992, has a foot sprain.
Globetrotting: Boston Marathon champion Moses Tanui of Kenya is upset that his country’s track and field federation has scheduled its pre-Olympic training camp in Hattiesburg, Miss. Tanui, scheduled to run the 10,000 meters in the Olympics, wants to follow the Kenyans’ usual practice of going to altitude. . . . Atlanta got a new indication the Olympics really are coming when the blue line marking the marathon course was painted on city streets last weekend. The line zigzags across main streets like Piedmont Avenue, using the corner-cutting tangents marathoners always take. . . . Want two guaranteed seats for every event in the Olympic Stadium at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney? They are part of the deal to 600 people willing to invest $28,800 in the $284.4 million public stock offering that will finance the stadium.
Bubba Factor: The cauldron where the Olympic flame will burn atop Atlanta’s Olympic stadium looks like an upside-down thimble with garish red paint on its outside. And whoever gets the honor of lighting it during the opening ceremonies will deserve some sort of medal, for it will involve climbing several staircases.
