Tweet
He is the fastest American to have walked the planet. But that's just not good enough for... Tyson Gay
By JONATHAN MCEVOY
Olympics Correspondent in Clermont, Florida
Last updated at 12:33 AM on 1st April 2011
EXCLUSIVE
Tyson Gay is moping around under a grey Florida sky, contorting his face, sometimes scowling, hands thrust in his pockets and out again, his words mumbled. Think of Andy Murray at Wimbledon when a line-call goes against him and that is Gay’s demeanour after a tough training session down in a valley where orange trees once grew.
Living in his own body hardly seems worth the hassle. He pokes a finger into his tracksuit bottoms and points to his right abductor. ‘You’re never going to feel freaking perfect all the time when you are pushing that hard, you know what I mean,’ he says.
The area aches, but it is not serious. What is serious, and matters like hell to him, is beating Usain Bolt in the 100 metres final at London 2012.
Meet Tyson Gay: he is the second fastest man in history, and that is precisely what he does not want to be.
London eye: Tyson Gay is focused on claiming gold at the Olympic Stadium
‘Being No 2 in any sport doesn’t sound good,’ he says. ‘I saw a programme on TV and they used me as an analogy for one of the football sides, the Pittsburgh Steelers I think. “Similar to Tyson Gay: can put up great numbers but still lose.”
‘It’s not really a burden — it’s just the way it is. In America it’s hard to accept No 2. It’s the pride of the United States. If people know me here it’s only because they follow track, even though I am the fastest man who has ever walked in America — football, any sport. I am the second fastest man in history and getting to No 1 is what keeps me going. It keeps me humble.’
We move up from the track and the elite training group of 14, five of whom run 100m in under 10 seconds, to the main complex of the National Training Centre, Clermont, where he details the clean living he believes will allow him to pull off the greatest heist in Olympic history.
‘I have not read Usain’s book,’ he admits. ‘But I believe he likes to party in Jamaica. I don’t have a view on his lifestyle. I don’t have that much rhythm. I don’t do liquor.’
Now warming to his theme, he suddenly becomes as effusive and evangelical as a preacher at his Baptist church.
‘Yeah, I have fun. I chill. But for me track is all I have. It’s all I know. I’ve been running track since I was 14 and from that point it was everything. I liked drawing as a kid. I played football and I liked it. But this I love doing.
Start right: Gay is set to hone his technique
‘Lauryn Williams (American sprinter) said last year that she took it pretty easy. She wanted to get herself together. To get a degree. To plan her life. It makes sense. But for me, this is all I have. I’m going to put everything into it. I can’t put my energy anywhere else.
‘This is why I am here. This is what I was made for.’ He taps the table. ‘This is what He blessed me with.
‘I’m going to tweak this in my technique. I’m going to do this or that in the weights room. I was watching some videos last night for a couple of hours and that was because some guy — a biomechanic — came to show me how the start should be done and I wanted to see online how others do it.
‘He put my body on a stick body that he said was the perfect positioning. He told me I had to do that to be at world record pace. He wanted me at this angle. I’m not so sure. We are all different.’
He rubs his clenched fists together to depict disagreement and adds: ‘We were like that. I spoke to my coach as well and he is thinking about what the guy said. I am doing my own research. If I get my start right and don’t have to come from the back, as I have a tendency to do, I will be faster.
‘Everything will come from that. It’s a 100m dash not 60m or 30m. You want to distribute your energy evenly through the race.
‘In life, too, I am not going to waste energy. It might give me the edge in London. It is what I think about. It is the reason why I can beat Bolt.’
That is all fine in theory. But what of 24-year-old Bolt, the superhuman who strolled over the line in mid-celebration to transfix the world with majestic yet devil-maycare nonchalance in winning gold in Beijing?
Gay, who had been injured, did not make the final, thus not taking his place among sprinting’s holy trinity with Bolt and his fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell.
Sure, Gay beat him in Stockholm last year, but Bolt was struggling with injury then. When both are in peak condition, will Bolt not run away with the glory?
‘I beat him 9.84sec against 9.97sec,’ Gay says. ‘When I said at the time that he wasn’t 100 per cent fit, I was not playing down what I had done. We were both 85 or 90 per cent fit. I was no more right than he was.
‘As world record holder (Bolt’s best is 9.58sec against Gay’s 9.69sec, set with a double groin injury) he does not want to lose. The point is that when he stepped out to race he did not think he would lose. Otherwise, he would not have been there.
‘If we are both 100 per cent, there is no reason why I cannot beat him.’
Stockholm syndrome? Gay beats Bolt in the Swedish capital
There is no arrogance to Gay. Even on the start line in the rawest, most alpha male of events, he is reserved. He is neither all mellow showman like Bolt nor all brash ego like his friend, and the one-time world’s fastest man, Maurice Greene.
He lives a quiet life in Clermont, a sleepy area enlivened by the recent addition of a cinema. Most of the time he spends in company with his fellow athletes, either on the track or in the gym at the Centre, where recovering car-crash victims and stroke sufferers from the next-door hospital share the facilities. When he walks in, not one of the in-patients waiting at reception takes more than a single glance up from their glossy magazines.
There is Orlando 25 miles east and the odd trip is made for a night out there. But more often Call of Duty, the computer game based on shooting, is the main resting occupation of Gay and his fast friends.
He says he can be a ‘goofball’ in private. He strikes me as a quiet, thoughtful leader of the group. That much was apparent as he chatted with them while they recovered on the blue mats laid out on the track after the session.
Twitter fascinates him. ‘It’s scary but the greatest thing ever invented,’ he says. ‘Somebody is always asking my opinion on something and I try to give them proper answers, real advice.’
He is also in close contact with his 10-year-old daughter Trinity, who lives with her mother back in Kentucky, where he grew up not rich but provided for.
Answer my prayers: The humble Gay has dedicated his life to his Olympic dream
His heroine is his mum, Daisy. ‘It wasn’t a strict upbringing. “Don’t do this. Don’t dress like that.” She didn’t transform me. There is mutual respect. I admire her. She is positive. She taught me there was nothing I can’t do.’
The difference between Usain Bolt’s 9.58sec and Gay’s 9.69sec may seem minuscule, but an increase of 1.148 per cent is everything in sport...
1m25sec: time off the world record pace you would finish in a marathon
17.23m: distance behind you would finish in the 1500m freestyle — or 10.04sec behind the 14min 34.56sec record
170 places behind Mark Cavendish in the final stage of the Tour de France this year, or 1min 52sec
0 medals won by Steve Redgrave at the Sydney Olympics — the men’s four would have been 4.09sec off the pace and out of the running
Where she was strict was over the issue of alcohol. Young Tyson was not allowed to consume it or even handle it other than for passing the occasional glass to his grandfather. At 28, he has never so much as sipped a beer.
‘At high school people knew I didn’t drink,’ he says. ‘When I go to a club I have cranberry juice. It gives me a red moustache. When I’m with a girl or talking to somebody they don’t say it’s great that I don’t drink. They say it is the weirdest thing: “You travel the world, run fast, but you don’t drink?”’
His coach, Lance Brauman, will be pleased. He is a sturdy, no-nonsense man, and hardly more loquacious than Gay. For a decade the pair have worked together, with not even Brauman’s year in prison for mail fraud, theft and embezzlement keeping them entirely apart.
Brauman’s take on his crime is that it was not a big deal: he was just bumping up payments of federal work-study money for scholarship students, saying that they had worked 14 hours rather than the truthful 10. He adds that he went to jail only for refusing to incriminate others.
It was 2006-07 and Gay and his training squad were preparing for the World Championships in Osaka.
So Brauman eked out the 300 minutes of telephone calls he was allowed a month, calling each athlete once a week. Gay won gold and Brauman watched his success from the TV inside the Texas correctional institution. Neither man wants to revisit the episode now.
‘It was a blow,’ is as far as Gay, who testified on Brauman’s behalf and visited him during his stretch, will be drawn on the matter. His loyalty — and that of another gold-medal sprinter, Veronica Campbell-Brown — was appreciated by a coach whose reputation was in danger of dissolving.
Gold coast: Bolt wins the 100m in Beijing
That brings us to now. The loyalty is more elastic, with Gay testing Brauman’s patience by splitting 2010 equally between Florida and Dallas, where he will train under Jon Drummond, gold medallist in the 4x100 metres relay in Sydney 11 years ago and an adviser in the period when Brauman was locked up.
‘Coach Brauman gets me in great shape,’ says Gay. ‘When I train with Drummond it is more personal, more one-on-one. There are negatives: nobody to train with, you don’t get the joking to get through the day. But you can be more meticulous about everything you do.’
Brauman walks through and I ask him what he makes of the arrangement: ‘I don’t like it,’ he says and wanders off. You get the impression that precision training is important to Gay’s prospects. Injuries to his hamstring, back, groins and knees have hampered his progress over the years.
'I’m still learning,’ he admitted. ‘I’m trying not to rock, to be more straight. To get my knees up higher rather than behind me.
‘I am slowing down in practice and trying to look pretty and relaxed and perfect. It’s a fine line between pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough. You can step it up when the meet comes and run faster with better technique.’
When does it come? Bolt and Gay are scheduled to meet for the first time this year at the World Championships in Korea in August: the reigning champion against the world silver medallist.
‘I’ll be ready for that,’ he says. ‘But the Olympics are the big target. If we are both 100 per cent fit it will be a world record, 100 per cent. I don’t know what the time will be. But I’ll do whatever it takes.’
So spoke a man for whom coming second is coming nowhere
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/oly...#ixzz1IDwL5MJU
By JONATHAN MCEVOY
Olympics Correspondent in Clermont, Florida
Last updated at 12:33 AM on 1st April 2011
EXCLUSIVE
Tyson Gay is moping around under a grey Florida sky, contorting his face, sometimes scowling, hands thrust in his pockets and out again, his words mumbled. Think of Andy Murray at Wimbledon when a line-call goes against him and that is Gay’s demeanour after a tough training session down in a valley where orange trees once grew.
Living in his own body hardly seems worth the hassle. He pokes a finger into his tracksuit bottoms and points to his right abductor. ‘You’re never going to feel freaking perfect all the time when you are pushing that hard, you know what I mean,’ he says.
The area aches, but it is not serious. What is serious, and matters like hell to him, is beating Usain Bolt in the 100 metres final at London 2012.
Meet Tyson Gay: he is the second fastest man in history, and that is precisely what he does not want to be.
London eye: Tyson Gay is focused on claiming gold at the Olympic Stadium‘Being No 2 in any sport doesn’t sound good,’ he says. ‘I saw a programme on TV and they used me as an analogy for one of the football sides, the Pittsburgh Steelers I think. “Similar to Tyson Gay: can put up great numbers but still lose.”
‘It’s not really a burden — it’s just the way it is. In America it’s hard to accept No 2. It’s the pride of the United States. If people know me here it’s only because they follow track, even though I am the fastest man who has ever walked in America — football, any sport. I am the second fastest man in history and getting to No 1 is what keeps me going. It keeps me humble.’
We move up from the track and the elite training group of 14, five of whom run 100m in under 10 seconds, to the main complex of the National Training Centre, Clermont, where he details the clean living he believes will allow him to pull off the greatest heist in Olympic history.
‘I have not read Usain’s book,’ he admits. ‘But I believe he likes to party in Jamaica. I don’t have a view on his lifestyle. I don’t have that much rhythm. I don’t do liquor.’
Now warming to his theme, he suddenly becomes as effusive and evangelical as a preacher at his Baptist church.
‘Yeah, I have fun. I chill. But for me track is all I have. It’s all I know. I’ve been running track since I was 14 and from that point it was everything. I liked drawing as a kid. I played football and I liked it. But this I love doing.
Start right: Gay is set to hone his technique‘Lauryn Williams (American sprinter) said last year that she took it pretty easy. She wanted to get herself together. To get a degree. To plan her life. It makes sense. But for me, this is all I have. I’m going to put everything into it. I can’t put my energy anywhere else.
‘This is why I am here. This is what I was made for.’ He taps the table. ‘This is what He blessed me with.
‘I’m going to tweak this in my technique. I’m going to do this or that in the weights room. I was watching some videos last night for a couple of hours and that was because some guy — a biomechanic — came to show me how the start should be done and I wanted to see online how others do it.
‘He put my body on a stick body that he said was the perfect positioning. He told me I had to do that to be at world record pace. He wanted me at this angle. I’m not so sure. We are all different.’
He rubs his clenched fists together to depict disagreement and adds: ‘We were like that. I spoke to my coach as well and he is thinking about what the guy said. I am doing my own research. If I get my start right and don’t have to come from the back, as I have a tendency to do, I will be faster.
‘Everything will come from that. It’s a 100m dash not 60m or 30m. You want to distribute your energy evenly through the race.
‘In life, too, I am not going to waste energy. It might give me the edge in London. It is what I think about. It is the reason why I can beat Bolt.’
That is all fine in theory. But what of 24-year-old Bolt, the superhuman who strolled over the line in mid-celebration to transfix the world with majestic yet devil-maycare nonchalance in winning gold in Beijing?
Gay, who had been injured, did not make the final, thus not taking his place among sprinting’s holy trinity with Bolt and his fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell.
Sure, Gay beat him in Stockholm last year, but Bolt was struggling with injury then. When both are in peak condition, will Bolt not run away with the glory?
‘I beat him 9.84sec against 9.97sec,’ Gay says. ‘When I said at the time that he wasn’t 100 per cent fit, I was not playing down what I had done. We were both 85 or 90 per cent fit. I was no more right than he was.
‘As world record holder (Bolt’s best is 9.58sec against Gay’s 9.69sec, set with a double groin injury) he does not want to lose. The point is that when he stepped out to race he did not think he would lose. Otherwise, he would not have been there.
‘If we are both 100 per cent, there is no reason why I cannot beat him.’
Stockholm syndrome? Gay beats Bolt in the Swedish capitalThere is no arrogance to Gay. Even on the start line in the rawest, most alpha male of events, he is reserved. He is neither all mellow showman like Bolt nor all brash ego like his friend, and the one-time world’s fastest man, Maurice Greene.
He lives a quiet life in Clermont, a sleepy area enlivened by the recent addition of a cinema. Most of the time he spends in company with his fellow athletes, either on the track or in the gym at the Centre, where recovering car-crash victims and stroke sufferers from the next-door hospital share the facilities. When he walks in, not one of the in-patients waiting at reception takes more than a single glance up from their glossy magazines.
There is Orlando 25 miles east and the odd trip is made for a night out there. But more often Call of Duty, the computer game based on shooting, is the main resting occupation of Gay and his fast friends.
He says he can be a ‘goofball’ in private. He strikes me as a quiet, thoughtful leader of the group. That much was apparent as he chatted with them while they recovered on the blue mats laid out on the track after the session.
Twitter fascinates him. ‘It’s scary but the greatest thing ever invented,’ he says. ‘Somebody is always asking my opinion on something and I try to give them proper answers, real advice.’
He is also in close contact with his 10-year-old daughter Trinity, who lives with her mother back in Kentucky, where he grew up not rich but provided for.
Answer my prayers: The humble Gay has dedicated his life to his Olympic dreamHis heroine is his mum, Daisy. ‘It wasn’t a strict upbringing. “Don’t do this. Don’t dress like that.” She didn’t transform me. There is mutual respect. I admire her. She is positive. She taught me there was nothing I can’t do.’
The difference between Usain Bolt’s 9.58sec and Gay’s 9.69sec may seem minuscule, but an increase of 1.148 per cent is everything in sport...
1m25sec: time off the world record pace you would finish in a marathon
17.23m: distance behind you would finish in the 1500m freestyle — or 10.04sec behind the 14min 34.56sec record
170 places behind Mark Cavendish in the final stage of the Tour de France this year, or 1min 52sec
0 medals won by Steve Redgrave at the Sydney Olympics — the men’s four would have been 4.09sec off the pace and out of the running
Where she was strict was over the issue of alcohol. Young Tyson was not allowed to consume it or even handle it other than for passing the occasional glass to his grandfather. At 28, he has never so much as sipped a beer.
‘At high school people knew I didn’t drink,’ he says. ‘When I go to a club I have cranberry juice. It gives me a red moustache. When I’m with a girl or talking to somebody they don’t say it’s great that I don’t drink. They say it is the weirdest thing: “You travel the world, run fast, but you don’t drink?”’
His coach, Lance Brauman, will be pleased. He is a sturdy, no-nonsense man, and hardly more loquacious than Gay. For a decade the pair have worked together, with not even Brauman’s year in prison for mail fraud, theft and embezzlement keeping them entirely apart.
Brauman’s take on his crime is that it was not a big deal: he was just bumping up payments of federal work-study money for scholarship students, saying that they had worked 14 hours rather than the truthful 10. He adds that he went to jail only for refusing to incriminate others.
It was 2006-07 and Gay and his training squad were preparing for the World Championships in Osaka.
So Brauman eked out the 300 minutes of telephone calls he was allowed a month, calling each athlete once a week. Gay won gold and Brauman watched his success from the TV inside the Texas correctional institution. Neither man wants to revisit the episode now.
‘It was a blow,’ is as far as Gay, who testified on Brauman’s behalf and visited him during his stretch, will be drawn on the matter. His loyalty — and that of another gold-medal sprinter, Veronica Campbell-Brown — was appreciated by a coach whose reputation was in danger of dissolving.
Gold coast: Bolt wins the 100m in BeijingThat brings us to now. The loyalty is more elastic, with Gay testing Brauman’s patience by splitting 2010 equally between Florida and Dallas, where he will train under Jon Drummond, gold medallist in the 4x100 metres relay in Sydney 11 years ago and an adviser in the period when Brauman was locked up.
‘Coach Brauman gets me in great shape,’ says Gay. ‘When I train with Drummond it is more personal, more one-on-one. There are negatives: nobody to train with, you don’t get the joking to get through the day. But you can be more meticulous about everything you do.’
Brauman walks through and I ask him what he makes of the arrangement: ‘I don’t like it,’ he says and wanders off. You get the impression that precision training is important to Gay’s prospects. Injuries to his hamstring, back, groins and knees have hampered his progress over the years.
'I’m still learning,’ he admitted. ‘I’m trying not to rock, to be more straight. To get my knees up higher rather than behind me.
‘I am slowing down in practice and trying to look pretty and relaxed and perfect. It’s a fine line between pushing too hard and not pushing hard enough. You can step it up when the meet comes and run faster with better technique.’
When does it come? Bolt and Gay are scheduled to meet for the first time this year at the World Championships in Korea in August: the reigning champion against the world silver medallist.
‘I’ll be ready for that,’ he says. ‘But the Olympics are the big target. If we are both 100 per cent fit it will be a world record, 100 per cent. I don’t know what the time will be. But I’ll do whatever it takes.’
So spoke a man for whom coming second is coming nowhere
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/oly...#ixzz1IDwL5MJU
Paul Marin -19 is one thing, 20 is a whole other matter. It gets even worse if they win the UCL. *groan*. 
05/18/2011.MU fans naah cough, but all a unuh a vomit?-Lazie 1/11/2015
Comment