Old Enough to Be World Champions

They are fleet but they are tenderfeet, both barely in their 20s, neither schooled enough to know that the 100-meter dash is supposed to be a race that takes seconds to run but years to master.

Maurice Greene and Marion Jones, both on the callow side of 24, gave the United States a 100-meter sweep Sunday at the IAAF World Championships, outlegging a Who’s Who cast of Olympic medalists and world pacesetters with respective times of 9.86 and 10.83 seconds.

As soon as they figure out what they’re doing, they could be dangerous.

Greene, 23, withstood a wily psyche job by Donovan Bailey, possibly because he was too young to pick up on the nuances of world-class intimidation tactics, to edge the world-record holder at the finish while leaving the likes to Frankie Fredericks, Ato Boldon and Mike Marsh far behind.

Jones, 21, tossed aside her basketball for a first taste of full-time, unadulterated sprint training only three months ago and today reigns as women’s 100-meter titlist largely because she coped with a false-start pistol better than 37-year-old Merlene Ottey, winner of 33 medals in major international competition.

Oh, but they’re still kids.

Greene spent most of Saturday’s preliminary build-up to the 100-meter final cockily predicting Bailey’s world record of 9.84 seconds was about to riddled with American track spikes. Word, as it tends to do, filtered back to Bailey’s camp and Bailey came out Sunday intent on teaching the lad a thing or two about minding one’s elders.

In their early-evening semifinal heat, Greene led from the gun, but failed to pull away. Bailey, complaining in the earlier rounds of a variety of ailments ranging from a sore hamstring to a mysterious weight-sapping virus, stayed with Greene down the stretch, finally pulling up alongside him the last 20 meters and staring the youngster down as if to say, “Guess who’s back?”

At this point, according to the Bailey game plan, Greene was supposed to spend the next three hours in a cold sweat, quaking in his shoes, stepping up to the blocks for the final a pulpy mess of wet-noodle nerves.

“We didn’t buy into that,” said Greene’s coach, John Smith.

That was because Greene was almost too oblivious to notice.

“Yeah, I could feel him doing that,” Greene said. “But in the early rounds, all that matters is making it to the finals. People do things. You just have to deal with it.”

Greene’s retort was a personal best in the final, a 9.86 wire-to-wire blur that one-upped Bailey’s 9.91.

American Tim Montgomery was third at 9.94, followed by Fredericks at 9.95. Boldon, who had run 9.87 in the Saturday’s second round, developed leg cramps between the semifinals and final and finished a disappointing fifth at 10.02.

“Do I have ‘final-itis?’ ” a dejected Boldon asked Smith afterward. Boldon, who trains with Smith and Greene in Los Angeles, finished third in both the 1995 World Championship and 1996 Olympic finals.

“My body just fell apart.”

Jones, a sprinting phenom who should have run most of her college races with a bib that read, “I’d Rather Be Dribbling,” won an NCAA basketball championship at North Carolina as a freshman and might have been WNBA-bound if not for a spring intervention by her shot-putter fiance, C.J. Hunter, and a new coach, Trevor Graham.

On May 1, Hunter and Graham put Jones on a sprint-now, rebound-later program that forebade her from driving to the hoop for here to the next Olympics.

Three months later, Jones remains a novice when it comes to technique--”She’s in elementary school,” Graham said earlier this week--but her raw skills are staggering.

Jones won the final despite losing concentration in the last 20 meters, allowing her arms to flail from her sides and nearly enabling Ukraine’s Zhanna Pintussevich to catch her at the finish.

So fast did Pintussevich close on Jones that, for several near-surreal seconds, Pintussevich actually thought she won the race. So did the Olympic Stadium video cameraman. There on the giant stadium video screen was Pintussevich--not Jones--being pummeled by giddy, back-slapping teammates, who urged her to begin a victory lap.

Watching all this, Jones at first wasn’t sure what to think.

“I thought I had it on the lean,” Jones said, “but with the celebrating she did, I had my doubts.

“But then I looked over to the stands and saw some of my American teammates with their thumbs up. That was when I found out I had captured gold.”

Officially, Pintussevich was second at 10.85, followed by Sevatheda Fynes of the Bahamas at 11.03.

Americans Inger Miller (11.18) and Chryste Gaines (11.32) were fifth and eighth, respectively. Ottey, the defending world champion, was seventh (11.29) after becoming unhinged by a false start she failed to acknowledge until she had sprinted a full 50 meters.

Fynes was cited for the false start, and the pistol did sound, but only seven of the eight runners stopped.

Ottey, meanwhile, ran all-out for 50 meters before the pistol rang out again, and didn’t pull up to stop until she was at the 90-meter mark.

Ottey was livid. Turning on her heel, Ottey glared witheringly at the officials and slowly inched her way down the track, every tiny step an act of disgust.

By the time she lined up again, Ottey was facing the task of having to sprint 150 meters to win a 100-meter race--difficult at any age, but nearly impossible when you’re 37 and severely ticked off.

“I don’t think it had any significance in my race,” Jones said, alluding to the false start. “Perhaps in hers. I don’t know what happened with her.”

If anything rattled Jones, it was the sudden realization, about 20 meters from the finish, that she was out in front of the fastest sprinters in the world.

“She shut it down too early,” Graham said. “She didn’t fall apart. She thought she had it won and shut it down. Then she had to start up again.”

Not the textbook way to win a world title, perhaps, but there are thousands of classically trained runners who never ran 10.83 at the World Championships.

Good enough for graduation? Just barely, said Graham: “She’s probably in junior high now.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

World Track Today

Men: 800 first round; high jump qualifying; 3,000 steeplechase semifinals; 400 semifinals; 1,500 semifinals; 400 hurdles final.

Women: 10-kilometer walk, first round; heptathlon long jump, javelin group A, javelin group B; 800 final; triple jump final; 400 final.

TV: TBS, 9:30 p.m. (delayed)