Meet the fastest man ever
BIG EDIT (TOPIC BANNED ON THIS FORUM)
Against a backdrop of poverty and family tragedy, Asafa Powell has run the five quickest 100metres of all time. Can he redeem the ultimate event in athletics? Click here to see our gallery of Powell at home in Jamaica
Alex Bilmes
Sunday April 6, 2008
Observer Sport Monthly
Dawn breaks gently over the lawns of the University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica, conjuring a rainbow to greet the new day. But the calm belies a gathering storm. In the distance, black clouds are menacing the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and the serenity of this winter morning is about to be shattered by a very big man in a very small vehicle.
At the corner of St Kitts Close and Trinidad Avenue, coach Stephen Francis is endangering the suspension on a golf cart while barking instructions at a group of around 50 extravagantly muscled young men and women.
When they are not standing around looking exhausted, the members of the MVP Track and Field Club are running extremely fast up and down a four-storey outdoor fire escape.
Article continues
But Francis seems dissatisfied with their efforts. A portly, tracksuited disciplinarian - sunglasses on head, whistle in mouth, stopwatch at the ready - he appears pained.
It has just gone 6am and his star pupil, Asafa Powell, the world-record holder at 100metres, has finally arrived, an hour and 20 minutes late for training. Powell’s excuse will not win him any medals for originality.
Apparently his alarm failed to go off.
‘Do you need me to buy you a clock, Powell?’ explodes Francis, from the driver’s seat of his beleaguered cart, where I am perched beside him. He is gripping the steering wheel with furious intensity, even though we are at a standstill. ‘I cannot abide this foolishness, Powell! I cannot tolerate it! Give me 25 runs up the hill. Go!’
The fastest man in the world shuffles off rather sullenly, with a look of wounded pride, and then begins to jog slowly up the potholed incline, his goateed chin buried inside his red windproof. This surliness further enrages Francis: ‘When I say sprint I mean sprint, Powell. I don’t mean jog!’
Coach Francis is soppy-stern, really. He is a pantomime baddy, fuming and fulminating but simultaneously struggling to suppress a grin. A bachelor, with no kids, he clearly adores his athletes. And he deserves respect. He is, after all, the man who spotted the potential in an also-ran high-school athlete and turned him into a world-beater. A world-beater who concedes he sometimes needs a push.
‘I’m not 100 per cent a hard trainer,’ Powell tells me the following day, out of Francis’s earshot. ‘Sometimes I will miss practice. If coach tells me to do 400m, I’ll do half. It’s laziness I guess. But it’s very, very hard. You have to be willing to bear a lot of pain. I’m not as dedicated as he wants me to be.’ This is not the kind of admission one expects from an elite athlete.
On his day, Powell can be as reticent as any tongue-tied post-match interviewee but, when the mood takes him, he can also be a good deal more candid.
Surprisingly, Powell is yet to win a medal at a major championship, but he is consistently the fastest man in history over 100m.
[NEVER THOUGHT OF THE OSAKA WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP AS A MINOR CHAMPIONSHIPS. 
kk]
Come the Olympics in August, he will be one of the most high-profile competitors in Beijing, thanks to his continuing duel with the world champion and his closest rival, the American Tyson Gay.
Tall (he is 6ft 3in) and handsome, Powell turned 25 in November, shortly after I travelled to Jamaica to meet him, and has now been at the very top of his game for almost three years.
That he is not world famous is testament to the slow decline of track and field in general, and sprinting in particular, as a popular spectator sport. While in other disciplines prominent sportsmen yet to hit their peaks - Cristiano Ronaldo, Rafael Nadal, Lewis Hamilton - are internationally feted, outside Jamaica Powell is largely unknown except by those who follow athletics.
[BIG EDIT IN HERE]
As a result, continues (Steve) Cram, ‘athletics is by and large not on terrestrial television. So it’s difficult for the public to get to know these runners. But it’s a shame. [Powell] is a victim of what we’ve been going through for the last 20 years.’
The sport’s marginalisation is regrettable for countless reasons, but Powell, as the fastest man in the world, feels the loss of prestige particularly keenly. And, without wishing to trade in empty cliches, he has achieved his success against the odds, on his terms, and despite a series of personal tragedies, including the deaths of two of his brothers and the shooting of his father.
Powell first broke the 100m world record on 14 June 2005, in Athens. He ran 9.77 seconds, beating Montgomery’s mark (now expunged from the records) by one hundredth of a second. ‘I can’t explain that day,’ Powell says. ‘I felt normal. I just ran, and then I saw 9.77 and I was waiting for the clock to change but it stayed there and everyone started to jump around. It was crazy. It didn’t feel real.’
As if to prove this was no fluke, during 2006 he equalled his own record twice, running 9.77 in Gateshead and Zurich. Briefly, he had to share the record with Gatlin, who ran 9.77 in May of that year. [b]But on 9 September 2007, in an opening heat at an IAAF Grand Prix meeting in Rieti, central Italy, Powell put his dominance of the event beyond doubt, running an unprecedented 9.74 and, incredibly, appearing to deliberately slow down for the last 20 metres.
‘I slowed down because it was the first run of the day and I had two more to go,’ he says, ‘and Coach told me to take it easy. So when I got to 80m I thought I’d better take my feet off the gas.’ How does he account for the extraordinary time? ‘I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I can do that and somebody else can’t.’[/b]
By the time we meet, Powell had run 31 100m races in under 10 seconds, including the five fastest times ever. And all this while training with a little known, underfunded and sparsely resourced athletics club in unlovely, crime- and poverty-plagued Kingston, far from the track-and-field centres of excellence in Europe and North America.
Powell’s continued residence in Jamaica is one of the things that make him stand out among the island’s best runners, who traditionally decamp for US universities as soon as their talent is spotted.
Not only has Powell stayed put but he has kept faith with [b]the slightly maverick figure of coach Francis and his MVP club, a proudly outsider institution (the acronym stands for ‘Maximising Velocity and Power’) which has frequently been at odds with the Jamaican Amateur Athletics Federation, the Jamaican Olympic Association and even the government.
‘We have not received one cent from any of them,’ Francis told me, not without bitterness. ‘They channel their money elsewhere and leave us high and dry. They are uncomfortable with our success. They are embarrassed by us.’[/b]
Jamaica has long produced world-class sprinters but seldom been able to hold on to them. The Canadians Donovan Bailey and Ben Johnson were both born on the island, as was Linford Christie. Merlene Ottey won eight Olympic medals at five separate Games for Jamaica, but in 2002 began to compete for her adopted nation, Slovenia. Jamaica’s current women’s 200m Olympic champion and 100m world champion, Veronica Campbell, graduated from the University of Arkansas. Her numerous medal-winning relay partners are all, like her, Jamaica-born but were educated and trained in America.
MVP was founded in 1999 by club president Bruce Handy, secretary David Noel, Stephen Francis and his younger brother Paul, who is marginally less gruff but scarcely less rotund.
The idea, according to the elder Francis, was that while American universities would cream off the top five or six Jamaican high-school athletes, MVP would be able to attract the seventh and eighth best, who otherwise, having failed to make it to the States, might not pursue the sport.
Basing themselves at U-Tech, initially they funded the club from their own pockets (Coach Francis, in a previous life, was a management consultant; Bruce Handy worked for Citibank). But their first successes, notably with Brigitte Foster-Hylton, who took silver in the 100m hurdles at the 2003 World Athletics Championships, attracted sponsors including Nike and Air Jamaica. In 2004, MVP high jumper Germaine Mason became world number two. The following year Michael Frater came second in the final of the world championships 100m, and Sherone Simpson equalled that feat in the women’s 200m. Meanwhile, a number of MVP athletes were winning medals as members of Jamaica relay teams.
But it is Powell who has brought the club international recognition. It’s his success that paid for the shiny new executive Audi in which Coach Francis takes naps between training sessions.
Francis first spotted Powell in 2001, when the sprinter was 18 and his best time was 10.85. ‘I didn’t see the world’s fastest man,’ he says. ‘But I did see someone we could train. Attitude is more important than anything in making the transition from promising schoolboy to professional athlete, and once he started training I knew he was going to be special.’
Powell was, by his own admission, far from the finished product when he began at MVP. ‘I couldn’t start,’ he says. ‘I used to lean way back when I was running. My arms weren’t going up. My knees were going too high. Everything was wrong, everything.’
‘It’s true. He couldn’t start at all,’ Francis says. ‘Now he’s the best-starting big man in history.’
‘I’m a fast learner,’ Powell says.
It is nevertheless difficult, looking at the facilities at U-Tech, to believe the scale of his achievement. The fastest man in the world, along with the rest of the MVP team, runs on an unkempt grass track, soft and muddy on the days I visited because of the sporadic rain.
The gym is more basic still, a tiny, dilapidated space of not more than 400sq ft, bolted on to the university’s auditorium. I spent an afternoon wedged into a corner there, watching Powell and his friends perform painful circuits of dead lifts, biceps curls, squats, rolls and jumps.
The fabric on the benches is split and spilling foam and what machines there are are old and outmoded.
The gym cannot possibly accommodate everyone at the club; even though the athletes are split into groups and the weights sessions are staggered, some still have to do their reps in the locker area or tiny ante-rooms. It’s always painful to watch someone pushing themselves further than their body is telling them it will allow, but it is even harder when they are world-class athletes forced to lie on the floor in a hallway. Other facilities believed to be fundamental to Western athletes - sports psychologists, dieticians - are noticeable only by their absence.
But Powell is sanguine. It doesn’t bother him, he says, when I ask if he wouldn’t like to have the same training infrastructure as, say, Tyson Gay has in Arkansas. ‘I can guarantee you that there is not one thing they can do at their gym that we can’t do at ours,’ Powell says. ‘I’m not a fussy person. I accept what I have. I do what I can with it.’
Steve Cram says this attitude is less surprising than it might seem. ‘Training is all about creating an environment that brings out the best in the athlete,’ says the man famous for training by running through the streets of his native Jarrow, Tyne and Wear. ‘Obviously, Jamaica brings out the best in [Powell]. It wouldn’t be right for him to change that at this point. You can’t run 9.74 without doing something right.’
Powell never wanted to go to America. ‘I’m at home here, with my friends. I’m comfortable, I have nothing to worry about. And people feel good that one of their stars has stayed in Jamaica.’
The first few times I met the fastest man in the world, he struck me as remote, perhaps unfriendly. Asafa Powell, even his mother agrees, is quiet to the point of taciturn. At training, he can cut a diffident figure. While his fellow MVP athletes are flirting with each other, and clowning around, he remains largely impassive.
On the morning of my second day in Jamaica I spend some time with the athletes at their track house, where I watch them trash-talking in patois (some I had translated for me by a friendly 800m runner, some he preferred not to render in English) and breaking out in spontaneous dance routines to Soulja Boy’s insidious hit ‘Crank Dat’. When Powell arrives he stands apart, not arrogant or dismissive, just separate.
On my first night in town, the senior figures of the MVP came to dinner at OSM’s hotel, without realising that the only tables available were at the in-house Japanese restaurant.
Much as I tried to interest Powell in sushi and sake, he was having none of it. It is not that he has a special diet, or is teetotal (on the contrary, he likes fried chicken and Guinness), it’s just that he doesn’t enjoy ‘funny’ food.
Nor was he much interested in conversation. Others around the table swapped notes on their experiences of foreign travel, but Powell would not be drawn. He seemed bored and distracted. How did he like the food in Italy? ‘It’s all right.’ What did he eat in Japan, if not raw fish? ‘KFC.’ What were his impressions of England, where he has competed on a number of occasions? ‘All right.’
The following day, however, as we drove the hour or so from Kingston to Linstead, the small town where he was raised, he began to open up. Indeed, by the end of the day he had become almost rashly exuberant. It’s difficult to imagine a Premier League footballer confessing to a journalist that it’s hard - sometimes even impossible - to remain entirely faithful to his girlfriend. Powell has been seeing Yanique, a graduate student, for three-and-a-half years, but there are a lot of ‘beautiful Jamaican girls’ and, as he says himself, there’s only one world’s fastest man.
I point out that in future he might be better off not confiding this sort of thing to the international media, at least not on the record. But Powell just giggles.
(Coach Francis, incidentally, assures me that sexual relationships between MVP athletes are banned: ‘If a girl from the country comes here to fuck Asafa, my rule is: “Go ahead, but you won’t be needed in training.” I can always tell.’ But when I ask the athletes how well this rule works, they raise their eyebrows knowingly.)
Still more difficult to envision is a European or American star pulling over to the side of a dangerously curvy highway in order to point out a particularly interesting rock formation.
‘Can you see it?’ asks Asafa, pointing across the river.
‘Where?’
‘Over there, see?’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘There, through those trees. The poom-poom rock!’
And suddenly the scales fall from my eyes. Sure enough, there in the side of a mountain is a large crevasse that looks uncannily like a sculpture of a vagina, complete with head-high clitoris.
‘Take a picture!’ suggests Powell to Chris, the OSM photographer, who half-heartedly obliges before we all climb back into our host’s turbo-charged Toyota Tundra. Asafa Powell, despite the responsibilities that he carries on his broad shoulders, is in many ways still a kid.
The youngest of six boys born to William and Cislin Powell, Asafa had a childhood that set him apart from his peers, not least because both his parents are pastors in the Redemption National Church of God. The church’s minibus sits outside the family home, opposite the Real Flex pub, where later we will repair for Red Stripes.
‘All my friends used to go out and party,’ remembers Powell, ‘but I wasn’t allowed to stay out. I knew it was the right way. I was never rebellious, never got into fights. All my brothers were always close. We looked after each other.’
He remains devout, even though his faith has been cruelly tested. In 2002, his brother Michael was shot dead in a New York taxi cab, apparently by an opportunist mugger. The following year another brother, Donovan, also a talented sprinter, collapsed on an American football pitch. ‘It was a heart attack,’ Powell says. ‘No one knew he was ill. He seemed very healthy.’
After Michael died, during what was Powell’s first full season on the international circuit, 'I wanted to give up. But my bigger brother called me and told me to keep doing it because that’s what Michael would want. I did it for the family.
‘But in 2003, when [Donovan] died, that really took a hold on me. I started to wonder, “Who’s next? Which one of my brothers is going next?”’
Despite being the baby of the family, Powell’s success means he feels like the senior member. ‘Yes, I’m the youngest,’ he says, ‘but I’m really carrying the weight of the family on my shoulders. That should be the job of the first brother. But I took up that responsibility and I’m just trying to stay strong.’
The fruits of some of Powell’s labours can be seen at the family home in Linstead, in the parish of St Catherine. It is a beautiful spot, a yellow-and-green two-storey house perched on the side of a steep hill surrounded by thick vegetation, with old cars in various states of disrepair at the front and a chicken coop out the back.
Asafa’s success has brought great happiness but also suffering. A few years ago his father William narrowly avoided death when he was shot in the jaw by burglars, an event that may have been connected to the fact that his youngest son, as one of Jamaica’s biggest stars, is perceived to be very rich. During the afternoon I spend in Linstead, more than one supplicant arrives at the house to ask for money. One of these is a ragged local 12-year-old boy with toothache. He needs money to pay a dentist, and is kindly asked to come back later when William will have more time to talk to him.
‘Everyone knows my father,’ Asafa tells me. ‘Even before I became the person I am now I was very popular back home, because of him. He is very respected in the town.’
Outside the house is the road where the brothers would race each other as boys. Asafa was quick, like his brothers and his father before them - William tells me he never met a man who could beat him in a race, until he became a dad - but there was nothing to suggest he would become a professional athlete.
‘I was always running but nothing serious,’ Asafa says. ‘It was just bragging rights: I’d go on the street or the track and say to my friends, “I bet I can beat you.” But I wasn’t really interested in track and field until my last year at high school.’
Asafa had other interests. ‘I always wanted to be a football player. In Jamaica those are the two sports that people normally do: football and track and field. But football is a sport you can do every day, just for fun.’ Failing that, he pictured a career as a mechanic.
‘I wanted to be involved with cars,’ he says. ‘I was focused on that. I wasn’t focused on going abroad, going to school. That wasn’t part of my plans. It’s my father really. My father is always working on cars, and giving them to me to work on, from when I was a kid.’
Today he has six cars, including a sparkling white Mercedes, a photo of which serves as the screensaver on his BlackBerry, and his pride and joy, a souped-up Nissan Skyline. It is faster than a Ferrari, he says. ‘You can get 1,500hp from it. You can get nothing but 600 from a Ferrari. That’s why I have mostly Japanese cars.’
His best experience of foreign travel so far was his trip to Osaka last summer, because he loved seeing all the Japanese cars in situ. But that was also his worst foreign trip. Because in Osaka, for some reason, he came unstuck in what has so far been the biggest race of his life.
Asafa Powell has been described, and with justification, as the big man for the small occasion. A choker. Almost all his outstanding performances and record-breaking times have been achieved at unimportant meetings, and against second-rate competition. When it comes to major championships, against opponents to reckon with, he consistently fails to perform. So far his only major gold medal was at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. And, as he says himself, Commonwealth gold means ‘nothing really’.
Powell’s failures at crucial moments date back to 2003, when he was disqualified in the quarter-finals at the world championships for two false starts - an event overshadowed by the antics of the American Jon Drummond, who was also disqualified for false-starting and refused to leave the track. ‘I got into a mix-up there,’ Powell says. ‘But no one knew me, so it didn’t matter too much. It wasn’t until the Olympics that anyone knew me.’
Mystifyingly, he came fifth in Athens, while his future nemesis, Justin Gatlin, took gold. ‘I didn’t run as well as I thought I would,’ he says now.
He missed the 2005 world championships through injury, coasted through the Commonwealth Games as world-record holder and approached last summer’s world championships in apparently fine fettle. His showdown with the new American prodigy, Tyson Gay, was much anticipated.
For Powell, it was a disaster. He came third behind Gay and the Bahamian Derrick Atkins (a runner frequently but erroneously reported to be Powell’s second cousin). He clocked 9.96, two tenths of a second off his best. More bizarrely, this was a race he had been leading until the latter stages. Watch it again on YouTube and he seems to slow down as soon as he senses Gay drawing up to his shoulder. After the race, he admitted that he ‘gave up’ after 70 metres, when he realised that Gay was going to run him close. ‘I panicked,’ he said.
‘Every single part of that race was totally wrong,’ Coach Francis tells me. ‘In Osaka he was focused on trying to beat people. That is a mistake. In any race you have to make assumptions: if you run 9.68 you will not be beaten. But he didn’t run his own race. He brought his game down to their level. His technique fell apart. He got distracted. Before the race I told everyone, “Look here, understand that nothing this season indicates that he will win the gold medal. Only a blind man would pick him over Tyson Gay.”’
Francis believes that most observers, even passionate sprint fans, remain ignorant of the exacting demands of the shortest distance in outdoor athletics. ‘People don’t really understand what it is like to run 100m,’ he says. ‘They think you just line up at the start and go as fast as you can towards the finish.’
Not so. [b]‘The 100 metres, essentially,’ Francis continues, 'is about the pursuit of perfection. In other words, the person who wins is the person who makes no mistakes. If you make a mistake, there is no prospect of recovery. And anything can cause you to make a mistake. Even if your finger is hurting, that can affect your race.
‘The champion,’ he continues, ‘can script his race: how many strides to take, how much effort to put in and at what point you put the effort in. You must have strategies. You have to resist the natural urge to run as fast as you can from the beginning, otherwise you will run out of energy at 60m. It’s short but it’s complicated.’[/b]
Powell clarifies. ‘Everything matters,’ he says. ‘Your position in the blocks, when you exit the blocks, the angle of your exit. The first 20m you want to get your strides as long as possible. From 20 to 50 you’re still getting the strides long but not too long. You have to cut it down because that’s when you start coming up, getting fully upright when you get to 40 or 50m. It’s like when an aeroplane takes off. You don’t level off for a while. Then once you’re upright, that’s when you start to lift your knees. At 60m you stop trying. Because after 60 you can’t go any faster. You have to try and maintain. You start relaxing and moving your arms.’ At its best, Powell says, it feels like flying.
Francis approaches sprinting scientifically. ‘Asafa,’ he says, ‘has always been a big man who takes small strides. When he ran 9.77 in 2005 he took 48 strides. [Former record holder Maurice] Greene is shorter, but when he ran 9.78 he took only 45 strides. When Asafa took only 45 strides, in Rieti, he ran 9.74.’
So if he takes the prescribed number of strides, he will win gold in Beijing? [b]‘If anybody wants to beat him they will have to run 9.6 and I don’t see anyone doing that. I haven’t seen that person so far.’ Tyson Gay, perhaps? ‘Like I said, I haven’t seen that person so far.’
‘There’s a lot of pressure at the big championships and the thing to do is stay focused,’ Powell says. ‘If I do what I’m supposed to do there’s no way anyone can beat me. Tyson Gay is good. He works hard. But he knows I’m faster than him.’[/b]
The journey from bustling New Kingston to the relative calm of U-Tech is a gentle climb through some of the city’s smarter suburbs, passing the famous botanical gardens and the city’s biggest tourist trap, the Bob Marley museum.
We turn up for early-morning training again on the last day of our stay. Out by the old volleyball court, Paul Francis is puffing on a cigarette, putting a group of athletes through a series of stretching exercises.
Next to us a cheerful lady is unloading boxes of Mother’s fish patties from the back of her Nissan van. They are destined for Andrea’s Grocery and Snacks, and later for the belly of Sherone Simpson, the 200m runner who is currently flat on her back, her legs in the air, a sheen of sweat causing her body to glisten in the sunshine.
For the final time, I am taken aback by the make-and-mend culture that pervades this place. ‘A lack of money or facilities is just an excuse for failure,’ says Coach Francis when I catch up with him to say goodbye.
‘Of course I’d like a new gym, or a new bus so we can explore different training surfaces. It’s true that we are not adequately funded. But success is all about hard work, about repetition. That’s what separates Tiger Woods and Roger Federer from the opposition: they keep doing the same things over and over. It’s not about what equipment they use.’
I shake hands and wish Asafa good luck at this summer’s Olympics. He is typically phlegmatic: ‘All I have to do is attend training and do what [Coach Francis] tells me to do. I put myself in his hands. I have a lot of faith in him. We’ll see how it works out.’
‘There is a lot of pressure on him,’ Francis says. ‘Pressure from his family, his friends, and the people of Jamaica. He’s like Ronaldinho here, it’s the same kind of adoration. It’ll be a national holiday if he wins.’
‘Sometimes I do feel like I’m the Prime Minister of Jamaica,’ Powell says. ‘It’s hard because every day on the street I always have people coming up: “Please, you must win the Olympics.” I have a lot of coaches in Jamaica.’ This time, he says, he won’t let them down.
· OSM flew to Kingston from Gatwick with Virgin Atlantic (virginatlantic.com, 08705 747 747). Flights from £600. OSM stayed at the Hilton Kingston Jamaica (hiltoncaribbean.com/kingston, +1 876 926 5430). Rooms from $180 per night
A very fast history of the 100m
1896
American Thomas Burke uses a crouch start - after the jury allows him to use this ‘uncomfortable position’ - and wins in 12.0sec at the first modern Olympics.
1968
Electronic timing is introduced for the Mexico Olympics, and American Jim Hines is the first to break 10 seconds. His 9.95 record stands for 14 years.
1936
American Jesse Owens becomes the first black athlete to win 100m gold, equalling the world record of 10.3 at the infamous Berlin Olympics, watched by Adolf Hitler.
1948
At the London Games, starting blocks, which had otherwise been in use throughout the 1930s, are allowed in Olympic competition for the first time.
1984
At the Los Angeles Olympics, Carl Lewis is the first sprinter to match Owens’s four golds in the 100m, 200m, 4 x100m and long jump.
1924
Eric Liddell, a devout Christian, pulls out of the Paris Olympics 100m because it is to be run on a Sunday. The Scot then wins the 400.
2007
On 9 September, Asafa Powell sets the current 100m world record, 9.74sec - three hundredths faster than his previous mark, shared with Tyson Gay.
1988
Ben Johnson wins gold with a world record time of 9.79 - but is disqualified after a drugs test. America’s Florence Griffith Joyner, far left, beats the women’s record by 0.27 - her 10.54 has still not been surpassed.
2000
America’s Marion Jones wins five medals at the Sydney Olympics, including gold in the women’s 100m, in an extraordinary sprinting performance.
2008
Jones starts a six-month prison sentence for perjury, after admitting that she had used illegal drugs - and lied about it - throughout her career.