Saturday, 18 August 2007
Pickering eyeing Relay medal, for now
The coach who, over 35 years, helped to shape the careers of John Akii-Bua, Colin Jackson and Jason Gardener has a new head boy for his training group.
Gardener’s retirement this month has left young Craig Pickering as Arnold’s No.1 athlete and the rising sprinter believes that he can win gold at his first senior World Championships in Osaka.
Following some legendary shadows
Under Arnold, Akii-Bua triumphed for Uganda over 400m Hurdles at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Just as Akii-Bua set a world record on his biggest day, so too did Jackson, who wore Great Britain colours to victory over 110m Hurdles at the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart. Next Arnold turned his attention to Gardener, who won the 2004 World Indoor 60m title, and took Olympic gold in the 4 by 100m relay, after switching coaches late in 2002.
Now Pickering, 20, is threatening to bring Arnold, who also helped to steer Mark McKoy to Olympic 110m Hurdles gold for Canada in 1992, yet another global notch on his belt.
The young Briton is not so brash as to say that he can win a medal at 100m in Osaka – he would consider reaching the final an achievement – but he is happy to talk up Great Britain’s chances of another memorable relay upset.
Such is the pessimism in the British media that forecasts suggest that the Great Britain team – 5th in the all-time World Championships placings table – may still be awaiting its first medal come the eighth day, leaving the relay squad to ride to the rescue. “We are easily good enough to win the relay or, if not win, certainly to get a medal,” Pickering said. Over to the quartet of Pickering, Tyrone Edgar, Marlon Devonish and Mark Lewis-Francis to do the job.
Of the British quartet which won the Olympic relay in Athens, Darren Campbell and Gardener have retired, leaving Devonish and Lewis-Francis as survivors.
Devonish is in the best form of his life and Pickering has won the European Cup 100m this season as well as improving his best time to 10.14.
“I think that might be taking it a little bit too far to talk of me reaching the individual final but my target is definitely to make the semi-finals,” Pickering said. “Then, if I am in the semi-finals, I can have as big a pop as possible at making the final. But I would be happy with a semi-final spot…I think.”
Pickering, the European Junior 100m champion, has been grateful for Gardener’s assistance under Arnold at the University of Bath and it will be a significant test of his character now that his main training partner has retired. He acknowledges that it will make life more difficult for him, although Gardener has offered to remain involved in an unspecified capacity. For now, Pickering is the only world-class athlete in his group.
“Hopefully we will be able to get someone else to come and train with us,” Pickering said. “I would like another two 10.1/10.2 athletes to make training that high quality.
"Jason asked me if he thinks he can help me and he definitely can – he has helped me so much so far. I would not have got here without his help so I owe a lot to him. I am more than happy to have him in whatever role he wants in my future development.”
It is two years since Pickering first made his mark in Britain, beating Campbell to win the 100m at the Bedford International Games. In his elation, he said that he “would like to win the 2012 Olympics” and that “a white sprinter has got to run under 10sec sometime so it might as well be me.” He has since learned to be more circumspect.
Of his career goals in the individual event, Pickering said: “To get a medal you have got to run 9.90 probably or quicker and could I ever do that? Who knows? I don’t know how far I can go in the 100. I don’t want to say I can run 9.90 and then I look stupid in five years time if I am only running 10-dead. I don’t want to say I can only run 10.1 if in five years time I run 9.90. You just don’t know what is going to happen.”
And, with the so-called ‘white man’s world record’ still held by Marion Woronin, from Poland, at 10.00, Pickering now treads carefully on the black/white sprinter debate. During the indoor season, when he finished runner-up to Gardener in the European 60m, he said that he was “scared of saying something that might offend black people – or even white people.”
On the 10sec barrier, Pickering remarked: “My aim is not be the first white man – my aim is to run under 10sec because that is what I need to win major medals. I do not want to get caught up in the white man thing.”
He will, though, give a direct answer on which sprinter he admires the most.
“Maurice Greene - the way he dominated everything,” Pickering says, referring to the 2000 Olympic and triple World 100m champion. “When he was on the track you knew he was going to win.” Adding that the same could not be said for the greatest sprinters now, Pickering concluded: “Asafa Powell, for example, has lost races he really should have won. Maurice Greene, in my opinion, never really did that.”
David Powell for the IAAF