Johnson, who would run in the outside lane, believed that he would be running a longer distance than Bailey based on the geometrical layout of the track. They wanted as broad a bend as possible, that was the real design challenge." "For the big sprinter guys, the less tight the curve, the easier is it for them to run. "We were trying to get as wide a bend and as wide as a radius as possible," Muller told VICE Sports. Without room to build a straightaway 150-metre track, Muller came up with a 75-metre bend and a 75-metre straight lane. Roland Muller, the architect tasked by a company named Mondo to design the track installation, had a once-in-a-lifetime challenge of creating a 150-metre track into a baseball stadium. When the two sprinters arrived at the SkyDome to inspect the track, they took issue with the set-up. "It was an effort to push forward the type of training he would normally do for a championship race in order to be ready for June." "Most of the time, world-class track athletes are not reaching their peak until mid-to-late summer," Hunt said. Johnson, who did not respond to several requests from VICE Sports to be interviewed for this story, focused on improving his starts in preparation for this race, and moved up his training schedule, according to his agent Brad Hunt. "I had Canada on my shoulders."īailey leaned out his body, focused on running the bend-something he didn't have to do when training for the 100-metre-and started practicing at running distances up to 250 metres versus the 50 metres he typically ran in training. "I've never, ever prepared for any race more than that race," Bailey said. There was just a lot of factors, where I didn't know if career wise it was worth the risk."īailey saw it as an opportunity to represent his country on his home turf, and give Canada its own version of the Summer Olympics. "It's a distance we haven't officially raced before. "There was a lot of variables we couldn't control," he recalled in a conversation with VICE Sports.
"The human race has always recorded the fastest man as the winner in the 100-metre, not the 200-metre, not the 400-metre."ĭan Pfaff, Bailey's trainer, called preparing for this race a more stressful process than the Olympics. "There was a lot of heated controversy in Canada that how dare the Americans take that title from Donovan Bailey when he had achieved that in the time honoured fashion of winning the 100-metre," he said to VICE Sports. "And that's understandable."įor Canadians, who had to endure Ben Johnson's world-record-setting run and subsequent disqualification at the 1988 Olympics, the fact that Bailey's claim to the World's Fastest Man title was not unanimous was considered a slight, a fact that Mark Lee-a broadcaster for CBC at the time-noticed as well. "Because of Johnson's double gold medal, his charisma, and the atmosphere on home turf in Atlanta, Bailey may have felt underappreciated," longtime broadcaster Bob Costas told VICE Sports. Johnson, they said, had broken a world record that lasted longer than the one Bailey broke and did so by a greater margin than the previous record. The majority, though, did not include NBC and the American broadcast of the Olympics, which celebrated Michael Johnson's world record in the men's 200-metre and Olympic record in the 400-metre, and pointed out that his top speed in the former race was faster than Bailey's in the 100-metre.
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