ON THE FAST TRACK : Ato Boldon Is Looking Like Sprinting’s Future

On any weekday afternoon, the track at UCLA resembles the warmup field at the Olympic Games. It’s thick with world-class athletes, collegians and others. Gold medalists are running repeat 300s. World-record holders are jogging around the infield and world champions are stretching and chatting.

Ten sprinters jog as a group. In their midst is an ebullient young man, his face animated as he tells an amusing story. Ato Boldon, UCLA senior and holder of the fastest time in the 100 meters this season, is in his element.

Boldon is an early and unexpected contender for a medal at this summer’s Atlanta Olympics, his status as the 100-meter bronze medalist in last year’s World Championships and the defending NCAA 200-meter champion notwithstanding. The 22-year-old Trinidadian was thought to be too young to have such aspirations.

The handicapping changed last month when Boldon ran 9.93 seconds for 100 meters at the Mt. SAC Relays. He’s being watched. This weekend at the Pacific 10 Conference meet at UCLA, the scrutiny will be ever more intense.

The attention is fine with Boldon, since he wants to be the prototype for sprinters of the future. He has the classic sprinter’s compact body--broad chest, thick waist and legs tapering to almost dainty feet.

Like most sprinters, Boldon has a ritual that he closely follows, as at a recent practice.

Meticulous about setting his blocks, he measures the distance back from the starting line by laying his hands on the track palm upward, six times, then adding the distance of two fingers. His left foot is forward and his right foot rests against the foot pad, four slots back.

He checks and rechecks the five-eighths-inch spikes that hold the starting blocks to the track. A year ago he gave little thought to the stability of the blocks but now his leg strength is such that when he explodes in his start, the force may dislodge his starting blocks.

In the on-your-mark position, Boldon drops his head and concentrates on the tip of his shoe.

UCLA sprint coach John Smith is asking his sprinters to run drills, timing them as they sprint to cones set at 10-meter intervals. Smith offers a mini-lecture after each sprint.

“Don’t jump--you’ll guess wrong every time,” he says. “Anticipate, and you’ll be OK.”

That is where Boldon excels, anticipating the starter’s gun. It’s a handy metaphor for the precocious sprinter’s career thus far: A fast start, followed by a false start, then back on track.

A NATION’S EXPECTATIONS

Sprint historian Don Potts notes that the sophisticated electronic starting system employed at the Olympics will bust Boldon if his anticipation bleeds into jumping the gun.

“I saw him at Mt. SAC,” Potts said. “He’s not going to get that start at Atlanta. Still, he’s a good chance for a medal.”

That’s what 1.27 million Trinidadians think too. Boldon’s career is being carefully monitored by a nation of sports fans who understand what the Olympic spotlight can do for national pride. Boldon, who is proud of his roots in the Caribbean, nevertheless is pleased that he can train outside the country.

“If I was in Trinidad, they would confuse sprinter with savior,” he said.

Boldon’s father, Guy, reached in Santa Cruz, a suburb of Port of Spain, provides the context for measuring his son’s popularity.

“It’s a Michael Jordan thing in Trinidad,” he said. “Because of the limitations on our society, when one hero emerges, he’s a hero for everyone in the country. When somebody local emerges, it’s a grand thing. We are always looking for a hero. What he has been able to accomplish--it’s formidable. He’s an icon, he’s a household name. The hype about Atlanta is starting.”

The hypee almost didn’t make it.

Boldon was headed for soccer’s greener pastures long before track got hold of him. With his parents divorced, Boldon, at 14, moved to Queens in New York City with his mother and younger brother. There, he resumed playing soccer and became, again, a star.

Joe Trupiano, track coach at Jamaica High School there, had heard of Boldon but had not seen him, until one day he glanced at the soccer field and what he saw made him stop dead.

“Awesome speed,” Trupiano said.

Trupiano did what track coaches have to do in high school. He recruited Boldon away from the soccer team, at least when the soccer season ended.

Boldon was fast, but he ran like a soccer player, with his right leg sweeping wide, as if to kick a ball. He had no technical ability.

Trupiano laughs when telling how he worked with Boldon to develop the sprinter’s start. Sometimes, when it was snowy, Trupiano would wait until the school parking lot was plowed and chip through the ice to set the starting blocks.

When it got too cold to run outdoors, they moved inside, using the school’s halls.

“I’d run toilet paper as a finish line and we’d run to the first Exit sign,” Trupiano said. “Pretty sophisticated stuff.”

Trupiano did put his sprinters through reflex drills that were sophisticated, though. He would have his runners lie on their stomachs, then he would drop a pebble. As soon as a runner heard the pebble hit, he was to jump up and run. The same drill was performed in the hallway, with a pin dropped to the linoleum floor. Whatever sense of anticipation Boldon has may be traceable to those inventive, effective drills.

FALSE STARTS

Boldon’s start evolved into its current formidable state. He is proud of having only two false starts in his career, one in high school when he was racing against a Trinidadian track star, and the other at last year’s NCAA meet in the semifinals of the 100 meters.

Then there was that other time.

Trupiano was taking a relay team to the Penn Relays and told his sprinters they would have to run time trials before he named the team. He knew the four runners he was planning to use, but he wanted to make a point about the importance of the meet. Boldon at first refused to run the time trial, saying he had nothing to prove.

Trupiano listened, then announced that whoever didn’t run the time trial would not be going to the Penn Relays. Boldon reluctantly settled into the blocks, then flamboyantly false-started. Trupiano left him off the team.

Three years later, Boldon showed up, unannounced, at Jamaica High. He sought out Trupiano and thanked him for being tough, saying it had helped and he would never forget the lesson.

That was the only time Boldon has been to New York since he left in 1990.

Boldon was always a smart child, but arrogant about his academic skills and perhaps complacent. At 12, he ranked sixth on a national scholastic exam in Trinidad, administered to about 50,000 children.

Boldon grew up on Ato mountain, named for him in a deal his father made with a land developer. The names Boldon carries are from the Yoruba language, Ato meaning brilliant, and his middle name, Jabari, meaning leader.

He has been both. But at one point, his brilliance gave way to scholastic indifference, a definite departure from form.

When Ato was young, Guy Boldon encouraged him to play outside, but would come back hours later to find his son asleep, head down on the computer keyboard. And Ato’s early academic record gave no hint of trouble to come later.

Midway through high school in New York, however, Boldon’s mother accepted a job in Atlanta. After much consideration, Hope Boldon decided to send her son to live with an uncle in San Jose, where other relatives also lived.

“It was difficult,” she said. “I decided it was a good time for Ato to be with the males in his family. It was not fair to him, at that stage in his development, to not have a male figure.”

The male figure was Leroi Boldon, a well-to-do unmarried veterinarian. He and Ato lived as wealthy bachelors, with Ato setting his own schedule and driving his uncle’s Mercedes to school.

Boldon did well for a while in school, but then, after scoring 1,270 on his SAT, his academic standing fell sharply.

“Ato may have been a little delinquent in terms of lifestyle,” Guy Boldon said. “When he had that period of difficulty, it was obvious that he had no direction in his life.

“Ato grew up in a very comfortable middle-class community. He accomplished too much too soon in his life. He had too much given to him too soon in his life. He needed a challenge. Track offered that to him.”

Hope Boldon remembers late-night telephone conversations, “mothering by long distance,” she called it. A management consultant, she had gone to graduate school and used her situation to light a fire under her son.

“I told him, “If I can have a job and two kids and I can get A’s, there’s no damn reason you can’t too,’ ” she said.

Boldon said school officials told him he might not graduate. He scrambled and did graduate, but the universities that had been interested in him had grown lukewarm.

“I had to go to a JC,” Boldon said of attending San Jose City College. “It was humbling and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. It changed my life. Once I got there, I realized I wasn’t half as good, in actual fact, as I thought I was in my head.”

Another false start and another chance to get back in the race. However, Boldon began to take classes just to remain eligible, not to transfer to a four-year school. He went to the Barcelona Olympics as an 18-year-old and learned the power of experience. He was fourth in his heat.

Back at San Jose in 1993, he took the year off and was an assistant track coach. He expected to go to USC and enrolled at Blinn Junior College at College Station, Texas, where he got his grades back up. But instead of USC, it was UCLA that took a chance on Boldon.

UCLA Coach Bob Larsen knew Boldon was intelligent, but he was concerned about the sprinter’s intention to apply himself to school.

“He convinced us,” Larsen said. “He said, ‘What do I have to do?’ I felt that once he did the work he needed to do to get into UCLA, that told me he was going to stick. We’re very happy he’s here.”

Boldon is the favorite to win both the 100 and 200 in the NCAA meet later this month at Eugene, Ore.

BACK ON TRACK

When Boldon placed third in the 100 at the World Championships last year, he became the youngest man to have earned a medal in the event. He called his father, at home in Trinidad, and told him the news.

Guy Boldon--who cannot watch his son compete, who paced his house through the long night when Ato was running at the World Championships, who won’t be at the Olympics in Atlanta because nerves will prevent it--responded only that Ato was doing well.

After Boldon ran 9.93 and became the seventh-fastest man of all time, his father betrayed great emotion and said, “Wow!”

That blurted exclamation meant everything to Ato.

“It was such a huge thrill,” he said. “That is my motivation. I want to get him to say that again. 9.83 is the next goal.”

Hope Boldon lives 20 minutes from the Olympic Stadium and has told her son again and again that he will be loved no matter what happens during the Games. She will be in the stands every day he races.

In Trinidad, Guy Boldon will listen for the phone. Someone will call him with the news, he says.

No more false starts. A country waits. A mother will watch. And high on Ato mountain, a father listens.

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Ato Boldon at a Glance

1992

* First athlete in history to win both 100- and 200-meter events at World Junior Championships, and represented Trinidad & Tobago in 100 and 200 at Barcelona Olympics.

1993

* Was the state junior college champion at 100 and 200 while at San Jose City College, and ran in the 100 and 200 in World Championships at Stuttgart, Germany.

1994

* Fourth at the Commonwealth Games in the 100 in personal best of 10.07. Also at the Commonwealth Games, ran personal best in 200, 20:50.

1995

* Won both the 100 and 200 at Pac-10 meet, setting stadium records at Arizona in both events. Set personal best in 200 of 20.08.

* Won the 200 at NCAA meet.

* Third in the 100 at World Championships in Goteborg, Sweden in personal-best 10.03. At 21, became the youngest man to win a World Championship medal in the 100.

1996

* Ran 9.93 at Mt. SAC Relays. Fastest time in the world this year. Seventh fastest all-time.

* Already named to 1996 Olympic team for Trinidad & Tobago.