He’s Worried Track Is Getting Nowhere Fast

Life moves at a different rhythm now for track star Michael Johnson. A delayed plane and a disoriented driver blow his morning schedule to bits. Johnson is nearly two hours late to Niketown in Beverly Hills.

Johnson is in L.A. as part of his Golden Victory Lap retirement tour. He is also here on a search, a search for future track stars and a search for signs of life in his sport.

The world’s best 200- and 400-meter runner for the last six years has given up the life of ferocious training. He is going to run a few relays this summer, including at the Goodwill Games in Australia in September. His retirement tour includes races in Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Japan.

In the United States, the tour is more like his day at Niketown Beverly Hills. He gave a short speech in the store. He went to the USC track and worked with kids. But he did not run. He did not compete. There aren’t any summer races in the U.S. for Johnson to run that congratulatory lap.

Johnson has won 14 Olympic and world championship gold medals. He gave us the most astounding moment at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

As he set the world record in the 200 meters, as he came down the stretch in the Olympic Stadium, he was alone. There was no one running in the picture with Johnson. In a race as short as the 200 meters, that is an astounding accomplishment. It was as if the track tilted downhill for Johnson and uphill for everyone else.

Our eyes, focused on that final stretch, saw only Johnson. As he crossed the finish line it appeared Johnson was outrunning his skin.

The moment was magnificent. The winning time was 19.32 seconds. A world record. We who were privileged to see the race knew that we were watching an athlete push himself to an absolute limit. It was frightening, almost, to see a man run so fast.

Johnson also won gold in the 400 meters in Atlanta. No man had swept these two conflicting events. The 200 is a sprint, a race in which you must run as fast as possible from start to finish. The 400 is a middle-distance event, a race of strategy as much as speed, in which you must train to be strong and fast and smart. If you are a world-record sprinter, you shouldn’t be a world-record middle-distance runner. Johnson was.

For winning that unprecedented double, Johnson has become a world famous star. Johnson added a second 400-meter Olympic gold in Sydney last September. That only cemented his popularity around the globe. But not at home.

At Niketown Wednesday, there were people from Japan and Israel, Turkey and Switzerland, tourists from places where track and field matters. But hardly any Americans.

This is Johnson’s great sorrow, he says, that despite all his gold medals and world records in the 200 and 400, track is less popular than ever in his country.

“My sport is in much worse shape now [in the U.S.] than when I first started running,” Johnson says. He is 33, a husband and father, and it is his time to retire. There is nothing more, as an athlete, that Johnson thinks he could have done to make his sport more popular.

Johnson became discouraged after the 1996 Atlanta Games because “more wasn’t done with some of us as far as marketing our sport,” by USA Track and Field. “We still had Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. And me. We were in the news and all of us were willing to be out there. And nothing happened.”

After Sydney, when Marion Jones and Maurice Green had dominated the women’s and men’s sprints, Johnson says, the USATF has been equally passive. “And the problems now,” Johnson says, “are so deep. Besides Marion and Maurice, where’s the upcoming talent? I don’t see it.”

The USATF’s single big event of this season, the national championships, begin today at Eugene, Ore. The 2001 world championship team will be chosen. Johnson won’t be competing, at either nationals or worlds.

It was, he says, never in his plans to run at worlds this year. Johnson didn’t feel he wanted to train hard enough early enough to be ready for nationals.

Last week, Johnson was quoted as saying he was disappointed that the USATF wouldn’t place him on the world championship team--based on his body of work--so that he could run a relay at the worlds in Edmonton, Canada later this summer.

The most admirable thing about USA Track has been its absolute standard that athletes always had only one chance to make world or Olympic teams and that was at the trials. It sounded as if Johnson wanted to ruin that standard, to be given something no one else had been given.

“I’m not upset at all,” Johnson says. “It was the people at USA Track who came to me and asked if I’d be willing to run the relay. Then someone realized the rules wouldn’t allow it. I would have been honored to run, but I wasn’t expecting to. Running at worlds was never in my plans.”

To Johnson, that is just one more reason he won’t work with the USATF to promote the sport.

“It’s not that those people don’t listen,” Johnson says. “It’s just that they don’t do anything once they listen.”

In his heart Johnson believes that by the time the next Olympics come around, he will be invisible to U.S. sports fans. It will seem as if his career never happened. Unless he keeps running around the country, preaching his lonely gospel, trying to encourage another Michael Johnson to come forward.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com

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THE FACTS

U.S. Track and Field Championships: Today-Sunday, Eugene, Ore., at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. Story, D9