Athletics: Going places fast

Allyson Felix after winning the 200m at the world championships in Helsinki. Pictures / Reuters

There was a distinct sadness in seeing the graceful Christine Arron, of France, put everything into her last hurrah in Helsinki last week.

With just 30m remaining in the world championship 200m final, the 31-year-old mother-of-one looked on the brink of earning the global reward she had sought in vain for so long.

Just 10m later, Arron's ambitions were at an end. Like a swift breeze, the future had just swept past her in the equally graceful form of Allyson Felix.

At 19, this God-fearing resident of Los Angeles has become a rallying point for women's sprinting in the wake of the Balco doping scandal which has deposited the previous world 100m and 200m champion, Kelli White, into suspension, as well as the woman who inherited her 100m title, Torri Edwards.

The fallout has also left Marion Jones, the former world and Olympic champion, in a haze of suspicion despite the fact that she has never tested positive for any banned substance.

If world athletics in general, and USA Track and Field in particular, could have invented a new sprinter to arrive in such circumstances, they could hardly have done better than the young woman who has been brought up with old-fashioned values instilled by her father, Paul, an ordained minister who teaches New Testament Greek at the Master's College in Santa Clarita, California, and her mother, Marlean, a junior school teacher who let Allyson turn professional as long as she continued with her education.

With 19-year-old team-mate Lauryn Williams, who won the world 100m title, and the 23-year-old winner of the men's 100m and 200m, Justin Gatlin, with whom she shares an agent in Renaldo Nehemiah, the former 110m hurdles world record holder, Felix represents the acceptable face of US sprinting.

"I'm not sure how fair a responsibility that is for Justin and Allyson," Nehemiah says. "But they are so young, so green, it's something they both embrace. They feel that if they are to be examples, they will be so proudly.

"The typical brash American is not the type of person I want to be around. Most of my clients feel the same and are happy to let their athletics do the talking."

Observers within the sport first took notice of Felix when, 10 weeks after starting sprinting at the age of 14, the girl once known as "Chicken Legs" finished seventh in the California championships.

Interest surged again in 2003 when she beat the world junior record for 200m in Mexico City, running 22.11s. Although the mark could not be ratified because the meeting had not arranged routine dope testing, it remained the fastest time that year. And it had been run by a girl who was still at school.

A year later, she had her world junior record officially after running 22.18s to earn the Olympic silver medal behind Veronica Campbell, of Jamaica.

"From the beginning of the year I wouldn't have expected an Olympic medal, but once I got to Athens I was going for it," the 18-year-old said when she got home. "Initially I was disappointed, but my family helped put things back into perspective for me after I came home."

Following her Olympic performance, she began to assume something of a celebrity status.

She and Gatlin were invited to the US Open tennis tournament by Serena Williams. They trod the red carpet in front of a worldwide TV audience as guests of honour at the Emmys ceremony. Felix set up her own website - on which she promptly posted pictures of the said evening, as well as recording her hilarity at the expression on Gatlin's face as he decided whether he should stand when his name had been announced.

Felix denies that she and the young man who won the Olympic 100m title last year are an item. "We just hang out a lot together," she says. And sometimes they drive out together around LA in her white 2004 Cadillac Escalade ...

Felix served notice that she was ready to shift to the top of the global podium last month when she won the London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace and ended Campbell's five-year unbeaten run over the long sprint. Her performance in Finland fulfilled that promise, and had the US media in a tizzy they had not found themselves in since Jones was in her pomp.

"Everyone is getting excited about her," Nehemiah says. "It's probably because she's so young, and so poised for her age. The other exciting thing is that we have yet to see the best of her. It's scary to think that she will only be 22 at the Beijing Olympics, an age when many athletes are just starting their careers. And so everything she does before then is just gravy."

If she continues to perform at the level she has set, Nehemiah's client, who began training last November with Bobby Kersee, husband of former Olympic heptathlon champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, could be awash with gravy by the time she gets to China.

That said, the commercial challenges are particularly sensitive in Felix's case as she returns to university next month to resume studies she hopes will lead to her becoming a teacher, like her mum.

Nevertheless, Nehemiah, whose extravagant athletic talent in the 1980s earned him the nickname of "Skeets" and saw him forge a successful career in American football with the San Francisco 49ers, is not averse to looking hopefully ahead.

"I know over the next two years Allyson will become a formidable opponent over 100m as well," he says. "She is a young girl, physically, and she hasn't done a lot of weight training yet. She is knocking on the door of running 200m in sub 22s. I think she will do that very consistently.

"The difference between Allyson and a lot of other female sprinters is that she is clearly having fun. When she won her world title last week it was the first time I have ever seen her clench her fists after a race. But it was done in such a subtle, ladylike way ... She's very unaware of what she's doing. I think sometimes she doesn't realise the significance of it."

How they compare

Women's world and Olympic record

200m: Florence Griffith Joyner, September 29, 1988, Seoul - 21.34s

New kid on the block

200m: Allyson Felix, August 12, 2005, Helsinki - 22.16s

- INDEPENDENT