KEY POINTS:
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.
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 said. "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. But there have been lulls; notably in the 1920s and 1970s and again in the 1990s, the decade when Greene's talent first became apparent.
After Carl Lewis had run his last great race at the 1991 Tokyo world championships, other nations had succeeded. Greene himself was eliminated in the quarterfinals at the 1995 Gothenburg world championships and, hampered by injury, failed to qualify for the 1996 Olympics team.
Greene trained with the equally competitive Trinidadian Ato Boldon, who was to finish second to the American in Sydney. "We knew if we both wanted to be successful we had to work together to get to where we wanted to be," Greene said. "He taught me things and I learned a lot from him. We became a dynamic duo." Greene's breakthrough came in 1997 when he won the world 100m title in Athens.
In the following year he set a world indoor 60 metres record of 6.39 seconds which still stands and then came his golden year of 1999 when he clocked a world 100 record of 9.79 seconds in Athens and the first world 100-200 double in Seville.
"Everybody was talking about US sprint domination being over," Greene said. "As a US athlete I don't like that kind of talk."
- REUTERS
