Tyson Gay, the quiet American ready to blow the Jamaican dream apart

In the sunshine of Birmingham, the world's second-fastest man was fairly exploding down the track.

Shirt off, muscles pounding, Tyson Gay looked in the form to dominate as he rose from that sprinter's starting crouch and, while powering away down the straight, managed to transform himself to full, upright running mode to hit his top speed. Time and time again the ritual was repeated as the American fine-tuned his starts, all focus now a week tonight and the 100 metres final.

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Focused: Tyson Gay

Focused: Tyson Gay

In any ordinary year, anyone who had run 9.86sec this season and 9.69 would be odds-on to win the mostanticipated contest of any Olympic Games, the race to be the world's fastest man. It's just that 2012 happens to be an extraordinary year.


For across the city last week, the Jamaicans were conducting their own training but not in the open, relaxed manner of Gay.

Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man and No 2 this year, Yohan Blake, No 1 this year and fourth fastest of all time, and Asafa Powell, third fastest of all time and No 4 this year, were conducting their sessions in private, prompting an array of questions.

What have they got hide? How fragile is Bolt's hamstring? And what is the state of his relationship with Blake, now that his younger training partner has knocked him off top spot?

'I didn't know they were training secretly,' said Gay, unfazed and unperturbed. He is the antithesis of the American sprinter, humble and softly spoken. 'We're only 10 days away from the Games and there's not much you can hide because it's about to come out.'

Tyson Gay takes part in a training session

But while Gay's training is open to analysis, with Bolt and Blake we have to guess. Jamaican journalists, who have the sources closest to them, say that they have been told Bolt is training like a 'monster', that the Bolt of Beijing and Berlin, where he smashed the world record at the 2008 Olympics and 2009 World Championships, is back. If so, why the need for secrecy?

And why the visit earlier this month to Hans Muller- Wohlfahrt, the renowned Munich doctor to the stars, if his hamstring strain is merely routine? Bolt was quoted as saying he was '95 per cent fit' on Friday. His agent, the assiduous Ricky Simms, quickly emailed news organisations to insist Bolt is '100 per cent healthy'.

So begins the intrigue for what has always been the most-hyped race of any Olympic Games. At London 2012, though, the build-up to the final needs no embellishment. Put simply, the five fastest men of all time - Bolt, Gay, Powell, Blake and Justin Gatlin - will come together for what could be the finest sprint in history.

Never before has such a collection of well-matched sprinters been gathered at a Games. 'Someone might run 9.85 and not even medal,' says Mike McFarlane, fifth in the 1984 Olympic 100m final. The entire field could break 10 seconds and this in our capital city, where the climate is hardly conducive to sub- 10 second sprinting.

But amid that excitement will be another question, always lurking. Just who can we trust in a race that has been proliferated by some of the most notorious drug cheats?

Explosive: Tyson Gay, right, warms up alongside 100-meter relay runner Trell Kimmons

Explosive: Tyson Gay, right, warms up alongside 100-meter relay runner Trell Kimmons

For among those five protagonists next Sunday will be Blake, who has a three-month ban to his name for a stimulant that informed judges regard as an honest mistake.

More worryingly, there will be Gatlin, who has served two drugs bans. Strictly speaking, his 9.77, which makes him the fifth-fastest man of all time, is invalid.

It has been scrubbed from the record books as it came after his second failed test, for testosterone, which led to a four-year ban.

Talk to Gay about Gatlin and you do not get the impression that he is thrilled that his United States teammate is back. 'It is what it is,' says Gay, who has participated in a US anti-doping programme called 'Project Believe,' for which he submitted voluntarily to extra testing. 'He's back now, running well and he's tough. But at the end of the day he does have a dark cloud over his name.

'It's tough him being in opposition because he was running around the time I was running. They say he'd done his time and he can come back and he can run and everything's cool, so I just have to roll with the punches.'

Roll with the punches is a term with which Gay is familiar of late. It is not just that before Bolt came high-stepping over the line in Beijing, Gay was the uncatchable man of world sprinting. It is that he has had to rebuild his body. In Beijing, a hamstring injury saw him exit at the semi-final stage. In Berlin, he was a distant second to Bolt.

By 2011 he required a hip operation at the same Colorado clinic that once rebuilt Alan Shearer's knee. But now he looks more like the man who, driven to new heights by Bolt, ran 9.69 in 2009.

Injury doubts: Usain Bolt

Injury doubts: Usain Bolt

'Coach (Jon Drummond) thinks I'm about two, three workouts away from being perfect, so it's going pretty well,' says Gay. But also when Gay has run in the past, he has done so with the knowledge that the testing regime he has been subjected to in the US has been considerably more comprehensive than that of his Jamaican rivals.

'There does currently exist a divide between the nations running the most-effective programmes,' said US Anti-Doping Agency chief Travis Tygart in September last year. 'They are in stark contrast to the quality of programmes in Spain, Jamaica, Russia. That's troubling because our athletes will be on the world stage competing against those athletes.'

FASTEST FIVE TIMES IN HISTORY

9.58 Usain Bolt

The triple Olympic champion took 0.11sec off his own Beijing mark with victory at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

9.69 TySon Gay

Matched Bolt's Beijing Olympic record when scorching home at the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix, in September 2009.

9.72 Asafa Powell

Powell clocked his best in Lausanne, Switzerland, in September 2008, to equal Bolt's pre-Beijing world best.

9.75 Yohan Blake

The young pretender beat Bolt's fastest time of 2012 to win the Jamaican Olympic trial.

9.77*Justin Gatlin

Broke Asafa Powell's world record in May 2006 in Doha, Qatar - but his 9.766sec was later rounded up to only tie with Powell.

*subsequently erased from record books because of positive drugs test

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Since those comments, anti-doping officials say that the Jamaican Anti- Doping Agency, non-existent in 2008, have continued to make strides. Equally, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), have authority to enter Jamaica and collect blood and urine samples. And the anti-doping authorities now have a much better test for synthetic human growth hormone, as the IAAF demonstrated last week by throwing out two Ukrainians and a Bulgarian for abusing the product after re-analysing samples from last year's world championships. The days in which the system was ludicrously simple to beat are over. Professor Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC Medical Commission and vice-chairman of World Anti-Doping Authority, insists that the race has got progressively cleaner.

'The peak of doping in my view was the late Eighties,' he says. 'And since the creation of WADA in 1999, it is a different era.' Gay insists the potential differences in scrutiny, even if they are in the past, do not enter his head. 'Part of the procedure for every athlete is to get tested and some may get tested more than others,' he says. 'I can't really think about who's getting tested the most.'

He needs to eliminate negative thoughts, not least because he has a chance of winning a first Olympic medal. For since he was last in his prime, before his hip operation, things have changed on the sprint scene. In short, Bolt has got slower. Last year, he managed only 9.76 and he did not retain his world 100m title, being disqualified for a false start in Daegu. This year, he opened up with an extraordinary 10.03 in the Czech Republic, his slowest race since his breakthrough year of 2008. He improved to what would usually be described as a stunning 9.76 in Rome a week later. But this is Bolt and that is two-hundreths slower than the Bolt of Berlin. And at the Jamaican trials, he trailed in second to Blake in both the 100m and 200m, Blake running 9.75 to Bolt's 9.8.

Blake is the 22-year-old world champion, the man who benefited from Bolt's false start last year, though, perhaps, that is a harsh reading of events in Daegu. Why was Bolt so nervous, so keen to get away? The start is still the worst part of his race - unsurprising for a man who is 6ft 5in - and on the way to last year's world championships final he had run only 9.88. His rivals in the final, Nesta Carter, also Jamaican, and Blake had 9.89 and 9.92 to their name respectively.

Maybe Bolt knows the days of standing up in the blocks and running down the opposition between 30m-60m are over. 'When he won in Beijing he was half-ametre down after the start but his pick-up between 30m-60m was phenomenal,' says McFarlane.

'What people saw in Berlin was someone who had executed his start and got to 30m before everyone else. Now we're back to 2008 and he's not starting. So it looks as though it will be open in London.'

Only Carl Lewis has defied the four-year cycle of decline and retained an Olympic 100m title. Even then he crossed the line second in 1988 but was upgraded after the disqualification of Ben Johnson.

But London's 100m final, a race that once seemed to be a formality, now looks a genuine contest. 'This is the big show, says Gay. 'It was only when I got here that I realised it's here and I started to get a little nervous, because it's the big show. I know it going to be huge.' It should be. And it is London's pleasure to play host.

Video: Carl Lewis: US will get the most golds in the sprints

Video: Olympic legends back Blake over Bolt

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