LONDON — During that period of nearly uninterrupted prosperity in the
Canadian sprint game, the torch — not to say the baton — was passed
from Ben Johnson to Bruny Surin to Donovan Bailey, although in reality,
it wasn’t so much passed by Big Ben as it was confiscated.Star after star after star. Guys running 9.79 (drug-assisted) and 9.84s that helped define an era, for worse and for better. And then … crickets.
By the time the Sydney Olympics rolled around, the Canadian sprint team was a spent force — Johnson was long gone, Bailey and Surin were nearing the injury-plagued end, the others from the gold-medal Atlanta Olympic relay side scattered, and there wasn’t much coming off the assembly line.
Fast forward 12 years. Actually, just press “forward.” It hasn’t been that fast.
Glenroy Gilbert, who ran the second leg of the relay team, behind Robert Esmie, ahead of Surin and Bailey, that dominated the sport in the mid-1990s, is 43-years-old now. There is grey in the beard. He sits at a dais with the rest of the Canadian Olympic athletics coaching staff and tries to explain — in that distinctive, late-night radio DJ voice of his — why this time, it’s not like Sydney or Athens or Beijing.
We might as well listen. He’s hardly ever told us a whopper before.
“You know, we didn’t always have a star,” the sprints and relays coach told reporters Thursday, on the eve of the opening events of the London Olympic track meet.
“I compare this team to our team in 1993, when most people didn’t think we stood a chance of winning a medal. In fact most people didn’t see us as a team at all, but we ended up with a [world championship] bronze and a Canadian record and you couldn’t, at that time, pick out any one guy who was a star.”
This was in answer to a question about the overwhelming, well … sameness of the eight sprinters — Justyn Warner, Aaron Brown, Jared Connaughton, Gavin Smellie, Olewasegun Makinde, Oluseyi Smith, Tremaine Harris and Akeem Hayes — who’ll be mixed and matched to try to find the perfect foursome for the Canadian men’s relay team in these Olympics.
“I think this is probably the finest group of short sprinters that we’ve had in the last 10 years,” said Gilbert. “We have four-five guys that are running 10-teens, and the others are 10.20s, and half the group are quite young, half the group you will certainly see in [2016 in] Rio.”
Yes, but … 10.15s and 10.20s? Those times don’t look very sexy.
“No, they don’t. I know,” Gilbert said, “but people forget, in ’93 our times weren’t that fast, either. The only thing is, we got on the track and we executed. We had one guy, Bruny, who was 10.05 or something, but the rest of us … I was 10.15, Robert was 10.18 and Atlee Mahorn was 10.20 … so if I were to compare the two teams, I think these guys are in that same position.
“But you know what the Olympic Games are about: they’re about performing on the day, with a lot of pressure on. That’s what we’re hoping is going to happen.”
Whether it’s more than just a hope depends on a lot of things, but the main things are getting the baton around the track without mishap and probably needing at least a couple of the sprinters to run personal bests. That’s the minimum.
It seems such an enormous gap between the 10.14 personal best Gavin Smellie ran at a meet last week in Germany or Justyn Warner’s 10.15 PB to the sub-10-second land Canadians, at least one at a given time, used to inhabit. No one has scared that territory in a very long time in our country; what are the chances it’s going to happen to one of the eight runners in the mix here? And when?
“I think we’ve got good possibilities,” Gilbert said. “If you look at a guy like Aaron Brown, he’s a very talented kid, Olewasegun Makinde, these guys are 20 years old. They’re going to run 100 and 200 and begin to cover those distances very quickly. The times right now, they’re not great. But Aaron and Olewasegun and maybe Tremaine Harris, two or three years from now when they hit their mid-20s, that’s typically where you start to see their best sprinting. So … by Rio.”
Gilbert’s personal best, in the “good old days,” was 10.10. It’s hardly a huge leap to expect these kids to reach that standard, but it’s that next 1/10th that’s the hard part.
And unless one of the kids in this crop gets there, chances of winning a relay are all but nonexistent. Gilbert says he doesn’t like to dwell on those days with this group, because he doesn’t want to sound like “one of those ‘You know, back in my day, this is how we did it’ guys.”
But it was comfortable, the Esmie-Gilbert-Surin-Bailey group, because everyone knew his place and his role “so you were able to execute under pressure” in world championships and Olympic Games.
“We ran what we called a horseshoe, we got stronger as we worked around the track to our anchor person, Donovan Bailey.”
Bailey, though, was a rocket. This team doesn’t have one of those.
“We’ve got to get one of our strongest sprinters out of the hole, we can’t run from behind, we don’t have a 9.8 guy on the end that can overhaul some runners down the stretch,” Gilbert acknowledged. “We have to get out in front and hold on.”
That’s what he’s telling them.
“We have to put everything in it right from the start, and keep your head down and don’t try to be creative. Stick to the fundamentals, use the energy in the building,” Gilbert said, as if rehearsing the pep talk.
“If we can get every single person to run to their potential, and just get the stick through the zone, that’s all we expect to do — we don’t have the sub-10-second guy. But maybe two-three years from now, we might.”
Until then, it’s a lot of ifs.
Postmedia Olympic Team