NEW YORK TIMES PROFILE OF TYSON GAY
Gay, World’s Fastest in ’07, Keeps on Going
By JOSHUA ROBINSON
Published: August 3, 2007
LONDON, Aug. 2 — Standing outside a news conference, Tyson Gay was bored. So without looking up, Gay, the fastest man in the world this year, began sprinting down an empty hallway Thursday as if in slow motion. For the next few minutes, he concentrated on the carefully honed movements of his arms, repeating them until they were exactly right.
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Tyson Gay ran the 100 in a wind-aided 9.76 seconds in New York in June. He is unbeaten this season.
“That’s only natural,” Gay said when asked what he was doing. “Sometimes I miss my job.”
Gay’s next work day will come Friday, when he chases the 100-meter world record in the London Grand Prix track meet. These days, working by himself on the finer points of his technique is a bigger part of his job than ever. Since last November, the 24-year-old Gay has been forced to conduct most of his training alone. His coach, Lance Brauman, is in prison.
Brauman, who also coaches the world-class sprinters Wallace Spearmon and Veronica Campbell, is serving a sentence of a year and a day in Texarkana (Tex.) Federal Correctional Institute. He was found guilty last year on five counts of embezzlement, theft and fraud relating to the illegal payment of work-study money to athletes at Barton County (Kan.) Community College when he was the track coach there. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
But even from behind bars, he plays a major role in Gay’s training. All of Gay’s workouts come from Brauman via e-mail.
“I’ve had to mature a lot,” Gay said. “You really have to be disciplined, coming to practice on your own, trying to do your drills correctly, without a coach to tell you what you’re doing right or wrong.”
His recent form, however, would indicate that he has been doing everything right.
In New York on June 2, Gay ran a wind-aided 100 meters in 9.76 seconds, one-hundredth of a second better than the world record. He followed that three weeks later with another memorable performance at the United States Championships in Indianapolis. He ran the second-fastest 200 meters in track history — 19.62 seconds — before completing the sweep with his best time of 9.84 seconds in the 100. He is still undefeated this season.
“I was always in the mix before, but I could never get over that hump,” Gay, who turned professional in 2005, said. “I was patient, I waited my turn.”
He attributes his success in 2007 to a marked improvement in his start over the past six months. “People were telling me, ‘If you run 9.84 with no start, there’s no telling what you can run if you get one,’ ” he said. “So I took it upon myself to get in contact with Jon Drummond.”
Drummond, who won an Olympic gold medal with the United States 4x100-meter relay team in 2000, began helping Gay in February.
“I don’t like the word coach,” Drummond said. “I’m more or less fostering the workouts. He’s got to get out there and perform, and I’m going to talk trash to him when he comes back. I don’t know if coaches do that to their athletes, but I do.”
Brauman is scheduled to be released from prison soon, but not soon enough for him to join Gay in Osaka, Japan, for the world championships, which begin Aug. 25. Instead, Drummond will make the trip to Osaka, where Gay is finally set to race Asafa Powell, who holds a share of the world record.
Powell and Gay have not met this season, which is reminiscent of last summer, when Powell and Justin Gatlin, the co-world record holder, seemed to avoid each other. Though he said he was shocked that Powell was not competing in London, Gay maintains that the world championships will provide the best stage.
“It’s just going to make it more exciting,” he said. “People call it ducking, but I really respect Asafa Powell for not racing me, because he may not be 100 percent and I haven’t been 100 percent for the past three weeks, so I wasn’t looking forward to losing.”
But by then, Powell may no longer be the world-record holder. Having recovered from knee trouble, Gay will make his latest attempt at the 9.77-second mark Friday when he trades in the hallway for the track.
“I’ve gotten here without feeling that I’m working hard all the time,” he said. “So in the back of my mind, I’m always telling myself that if I work even harder, who knows what I can do?”