By Philip Hersh
Tribune staff reporter
June 14, 2005,
He was a soccer player as a teenager, but it wasn’t Asafa Powell’s skills with a ball that caught the attention of a teacher at Charlemont High School in the St. Catherine’s district of Jamaica.
But when Enid Fraser told Powell, “Do you know you have the potential to run really fast?” his initial response was to laugh at such an idea.
“Every day, I should call her and thank her,” Powell said Tuesday by telephone from Athens.
The reason for that gratitude is Powell took Fraser’s suggestion to become a runner and now is the world’s fastest human, having covered 100 meters in a world-record 9.77 seconds at Tuesday’s Super Grand Prix meet in the Athens Olympic Stadium.
Powell, 22, broke the controversial mark of 9.78 that Tim Montgomery of the United States set Sept. 14, 2002, in Paris.
In an event the U.S. has dominated for the 93 years since the international track federation has certified 100-meter records, the Jamaican joins a pantheon that includes U.S. Olympic champions Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes, Carl Lewis and Maurice Greene.
Another U.S. Olympic champion, Jim Hines, was first to break 10 seconds for 100 meters in a race with official electronic timing rather than hand timing with stopwatches.
Hines’ time of 9.95 at the 1968 Olympics stood 15 years, the longest duration for an 100-meter record timed to 100ths of a second. The record has been broken seven times in the past 15 years.
Powell, the youngest world record-holder in the event since Hines, is the first person representing Jamaica to break a track and field world record in 35 years and the first man in 55 years. He also is the rare top Jamaican sprinter in the past half-century who neither went to college in the U.S. nor wound up bringing glory to another country.
“I made up my mind to stay here and try to do something different,” Powell said. “It paid off.”
It came 10 months after the Jamaican’s disappointing performance in the 100 on the same track at the 2004 Olympics. Powell had come to the Olympics with three straight victories in major European circuit races.
“Everyone has been saying I’m the favorite, and I’m not going to object,” Powell said three days before the Olympic final. “I don’t mind going in as the favorite.”
He finished fifth with a time, 9.94, that was the fastest by a fifth placer in Olympic history.
“It was disappointing but I just moved on,” Powell said.
The Olympics was Powell’s only 2004 loss in nine 100-meter races. He finished 2004 with the No. 1 ranking in the world after bettering 10 seconds for the 100 nine times, matching the single-season record for such performances.
Powell picked up faster than he left off. He ran a personal best 9.84, the world’s fastest time of 2005 until Tuesday, at a May 7 race in Jamaica and an even more impressive 9.85 on a rainy, 46-degree night last Thursday in the Czech Republic.
The latter race allowed him to think the world record was possible under good conditions in Athens. He ran in a temperature of 75 and a tailwind of 3.5 m.p.h., approaching the legal limit (4.4 m.p.h.) for record purposes.
“I saw it coming but it has hit me like a hurricane,” Powell said of the record.
Not since 1976 has a man broken or tied the world record so early in a season, although Greene did it two days later in 1999 with a 9.79 on a different track in the same stadium. That means Powell will be inundated with attention for the rest of a season highlighted by the world championships in early August.
“I want to remain focused and humble,” Powell said. “I think I can do better.”