GOLD RUSH

By Steve Wulf

So much to do, so little time. The 100-m dash is at once the shortest foot race in the Olympics, the longest running and the most fabled. It has belonged to Harold Abrahams, Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes, Carl Lewis, Wilma Rudolph and Flo-Jo, not to mention a man named Stella. Ever since Antwerp in 1920, when Charley Paddock gulped down a raw egg in a glass of sherry and defeated five rivals with a time of 10.8 sec., the winner has been declared "the world's fastest human." Basically, the race is 10 sec. that last a lifetime. Adding to its allure for the 1996 Centennial Games is the convergence of time and distance: 100 years, 100 meters. What's more, Atlanta seems to have been handed two 100th-anniversary gifts from the Greek gods in the form of a matching set of tantalizing his-and-hers 100s.

The very first race in the 1896 Athens Olympics was a preliminary heat of the 100. The eventual winner of the race was a Bostonian named Thomas Burke, who after winning the final in 12.0 sec. went on to become a lawyer and a journalist; he was also the official starter for the first Boston Marathon in 1897. Americans have long dominated the event, winning 14 of 22 Olympic 100s, finishing one-two seven times and sweeping the medals twice. Interestingly enough, three of the first seven winners acquired law degrees, including Abrahams, the Brit whose 1924 race against anti-Semitism was chronicled in the film Chariots of Fire.

The greatest track athlete of all time, of course, was Jesse Owens. The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Owens said his secret was, "I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible." In Berlin in '36 he began his assault on Hitler's Aryan-superiority theory with his victory in the 100, the first of his four gold medals. African Americans would in fact win all but three Olympic 100s from 1932 to 1968. The blessing of modern professionalism is that runners can keep running; Owens had to resort to racing thoroughbreds in exhibitions, and the '64 and '68 winners, Bob Hayes and Jim Hines, turned to pro football for their livelihood.

The first of Carl Lewis' eight gold medals came in the 100 in the '84 Los Angeles Games. When his father died in 1987, Lewis placed that medal in his coffin and said, "I want you to have this because it was your favorite event." Seeing his mother's surprise, Lewis said, "Don't worry, I'll get another one." He did, but only as a consequence of the greatest scandal in Olympic history: the 1988 100 m. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, whose motto was "When the gun goes off, the race is over," flashed across the finish line in Seoul in a world-record time of 9.79 sec. Unfortunately, when his urine test came in, it was all over for Johnson. Lewis, the second-place finisher, was awarded the gold.

The women of the 100 also have a rich history, dating back to Amsterdam in '28, when a 16-year-old from Riverdale, Illinois, Betty Robinson, won the race--the very first track event for women--with a time of 12.2 sec. What made Robinson's victory so remarkable was that the Olympics was only her fourth track meet. The 1932 winner was Stanislawa Walasiewicz of Poland, who was better known in the U.S., her second country, as Stella Walsh. According to an official, Walsh ran "with long, manlike strides." The reason for that became clear some 48 years later when Walsh, an innocent bystander, was killed in a robbery attempt in Cleveland. An autopsy revealed she was actually a man.

There was no mistaking the sex of the great Wilma Rudolph, who was a young mother when she won the 100, the first of her three gold medals, at the Rome Olympics in 1960. She in turn passed the baton to another Tennessee State runner, Wyomia Tyus, who won in both '64 and '68 to become the first runner, man or woman, to win an Olympic sprint twice. African-American women have also won the past three 100s: Evelyn Ashford in '84, the flamboyant Florence Griffith-Joyner in '88 and Gail Devers in '92.

When Harold Abrahams went to the starting line in Paris in '24, his coach, Sam Mussabini, told him, "Only think of two things--the report of the pistol and the tape. When you hear the one, just run like hell till you break the other." There is a little more to the 100 than that. Even though it's over in a heartbeat, the race has three distinct stages: start, acceleration and deceleration. The start itself has two components, the reaction to the gun and the angle of takeoff. Says Brigham Young University track coach Willard Hirschi: "If you come up too quickly, you lose acceleration. If you lean too far, you can stumble. It is like an airplane taking off--there is an ideal angle at which you can generate speed." To get up to speed--about 23 m.p.h. at their fastest--runners have to be careful not to try too hard. As Hirschi says, "Speed and effort are not synonymous." Then, once they reach top speed at 40 m, the key becomes economy of motion. "That's why Carl Lewis always looked like he was eating everyone for lunch," says Hirschi. "He was slowing down the least."

Lewis, now 35, was unable to qualify for the 100 in Atlanta, but the finals will still have tremendous wattage on the evening of July 27. Among the contestants will be Barcelona's prickly champ, Linford Christie of Britain; Ato Boldon of Trinidad by way of UCLA; Canada's two heirs to Ben Johnson, world champion Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin; and Frankie Fredericks of Namibia and Brigham Young University. Fredericks, who is coached by Hirschi and is employed on the business side of a Namibian uranium mine, has been positively radioactive of late, running the second- and third-fastest 100s in history and then ending Michael Johnson's 21-race winning streak in the 200. There are also the three sprinters who will be trying to keep the U.S. from losing its first Olympic 100 on its own soil: Dennis Mitchell, Mike Marsh and Jon Drummond, a preacher's son who still sings with the gospel group Kirk Franklin and the Family.

While the men's 100 has a global feel to it, the women's dash could be a hometown celebration for pre-race favorite Gwen Torrence, who grew up in nearby Decatur, Georgia, and lives in Livonia. "God sent [the Olympics] here to make up for what happened to me in 1992," Torrence has said, referring to the Barcelona 100, when she finished fourth and then accused two of the three medalists of drug use. All three of those medalists--Devers, Juliet Cuthbert of Jamaica and Irina Privalova of Russia--will be back, which should make for some interesting stares as the women line up for the start.

"You can just imagine what the air of the Olympics is going to be when that 100 begins," says Mitchell, who would love to redeem himself after finishing third to Christie and Fredericks in Barcelona. "It's going to be just crazy. I don't even know if I can handle it, and I'm one of the athletes competing." All that anticipation over something that takes just 10 seconds. All that importance attached to just six grams of gold.

--Reported by Loren Mooney/New York

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