LONDON - Betrayed finally by the body which once hurtled along a track faster than any man in the world, Maurice Greene reached journey's end this month.
Maurice Greene, former US world and Olympic champion in the 100m and 200m sprints, poses in Beijing, where he said he would not be competing in the 2008 Games and that his future would probably be in coaching. The veteran Greene, who won the 100m and 200m gold in Sydney in 2000, said that he was sad he would not race here in August but felt the United States had a worthy successor in Tyson Gay. [Agencies] |
At the age of 33, the 2000 Sydney Olympics 100 metres champion conceded that he could not get in shape in time for the Beijing Games and announced his retirement.
"I was getting these little nagging injuries that have just stopped me from training the way that I need to," Greene told Reuters in a telephone interview from Los Angeles this week.
"It's a mental battle trying to come back from injuries and I don't feel like having that mental battle with myself."
American hegemony in the men's 100 metres has been taken for granted since the rebirth of the Olympic Games in 1896. In reality, there have been lulls; notably in the 1920s and 1970s and again in the 1990s, the decade when Greene's raw talent first became apparent in his home town of Kansas City.
After Carl Lewis had run his last great race at the 1991 Tokyo world championships, Linford Christie won the 1992 Olympic title for Britain in Barcelona.
Christie captured the 1993 world title and was then succeeded as world and Olympic champion by another Jamaican-born sprinter, Canadian Donovan Bailey.
Meanwhile, Greene was eliminated in the quarter-finals at the 1995 Gothenburg world championships and, hampered by a hamstring injury, failed to qualify for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics team.
HARD PATH
Greene came up the hard way. In Kansas City he worked in fast food outlets, emptied trucks and tore tickets at a movie theatre. Frustrated by his lack of progress in athletics, he decided in 1996 to drive to Los Angeles with his father Ernest to train with John Smith, by common consent the best sprint coach in the world.
"I just told myself I needed a change," Greene recalled. "If I really wanted to do something I had to go to someplace else. I decided to go to John Smith.
"He worked me very hard. He asked me what I wanted to do and I wanted to be the best in the world."
Training with the equally competitive Trinidadian Ato Boldon, who was to finish second to the American in Sydney, Greene set out to attain his goal.
"We knew if we both wanted to be successful we had to work together to get to where we wanted to be," Greene said.
