In a drought year we need excitement on and off the track
By Michael Johnson
(Filed: 03/05/2006)
This will be a very interesting year and a challenging one for athletics. With no Olympic Games or World Championships, the focus and attention will rely strictly on great performances and match-ups on the track and the personalities off the track.
Michael Johnson: ‘I was known as a little bit arrogant’
Unfortunately, the sport today, compared with even just a few years ago, is in desperate need of a few stand-out athletes whose personalities - along with their performances - will make you want to watch athletics and keep you interested.
The generation just before mine had Carl Lewis, who was flamboyant, arrogant and controversial, and Ben Johnson, who hated Carl and had his own very different style going head to head.
And there was Florence Griffith Joyner, who made fashion statements on the track, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the picture of class, consistency and professionalism, and Edwin Moses, a profound man and the most consistent athlete in the history of the sport.
During my era, I was known as being incredibly driven, a little bit arrogant and somewhat stand-offish, but then, just as now, I had an opinion about anything and everything.
We had Linford Christie, who was known to be extremely arrogant, Maurice Greene with his swagger and tongue-wagging antics before every race and who proclaimed himself “the greatest of all time”, Marion Jones who didn’t say much about anything but certainly kept the journalists busy with her off-the-track relationships with the shot-putter C J Hunter and sprinter Tim Montgomery.
This new generation of athletes is incredibly talented. I would argue that they are, collectively, as talented as the athletes of my generation, who competed during the Nineties and included Donovan Bailey, Greene, Jones, Haile Gebrselassie, Cathy Freeman, Frankie Fredericks, and Hicham El Guerrouj.
:eek: But the new generation, talented as they are, lack the individual personalities that add the extra spice the sport needs, particularly in years like this when there is no major championship.
During 2002, the last off-year, the Jones/Montgomery relationship was revealed, Greene’s career was going up in flames while he was still comparing himself to Muhammad Ali, and Paula Radcliffe was tearing up the track and the road while gaining major attention with her outspoken views.
The athletes of today just cannot match the previous generation when it comes to excitement and interest.
Justin Gatlin, as the world and Olympic 100 metres champion, stands out as athletics’ most visible competitor these days.
Asafa Powell, the 100m world record holder, should also be one of the more visible athletes in the sport but most people probably would not recognise him if they saw him walking down the street, because he rarely has anything to say about anything.
There should be a furious debate about who is really the fastest man in the world. The last time that was a hot topic, Lewis and Johnson were facing off in Seoul in 1988 in what was probably the most watched event in Olympic athletics history.
And then, in 1997, there was a $2 million race between Bailey and me, and I wasn’t even a 100m runner. Now we have the perfect situation with Gatlin and Powell, but nobody is talking about match races or showdowns or any such thing.
I’m certainly not suggesting that an athlete should try to be something he’s not, but the sport and the athletes are in desperate need of a little more excitement.
:eek: Nor am I suggesting that we go back to the days of people like John Drummond, the self-proclaimed Clown Prince of Track and Field, who made a name for himself with his pre-race silly acts 
after realising that he might never achieve real success as a serious athlete.
I am, however, suggesting that this new generation of athletes show more of their personalities and at least have an opinion about something.
This year is an important part of the build-up to the next Olympics Games. And with the Olympics and World Championships being so important to the sport, it is essential that in the odd year in the four-year cycle which has neither, that not only the performance of the athletes on the track but the stories and the personalities off it sustain the interest of fans and media.