Wariner: a 20-year-old Olympic champion

Texasbased Jeremy Wariner took over the mantle of World record holder Michael Johnson as he scored a convincing win in the 400m Olympic final. A pupil of Clyde Hart, Wariner also anchored the US to victory in the 4x400m relay. Ed Gordon reports.

There can hardly be a better stage for unveiling a new product than the Olympic Games. The reach is broad and the audience is universal.

Corporations have recognized this idea in the years since Peter Ueberroth first introduced direct sponsorships to the Games in 1984, and athletes have used such opportunities to become instantly recognizable for an even longer time.

Counted among those who have suddenly rocketed to stardom under the Five-Ring Microscope is a most unassuming young Texan. His recent win in the Athens 400 metres represented a significant initial step in filling the large shoes left empty by the retirement of Michael Johnson after the 2000 season.

A glimpse of Jeremy Wariner does not engender comparisons with muscular runners who often are the leading practitioners of the one-lap event. Arrow-thin at 1.83m and 73kg, the 20-year-old would appear to be a habitué of just about any venue far removed from competitive sport.

But, as the cliché goes, looks can be deceiving.

Wariner’s first appearance before a wide audience came this past July at the US Olympic Trials. Even before his arrival in Sacramento, insiders harboured scepticism about whether the young runner, who had never before strayed long or far from his Texas roots, would be able to cope with running multiple rounds against so many rivals with superior international experience. 

The biggest challenges of his brief young sporting life were also only starting to appear after the completion of a strenuous six-month season with his university team.

What Wariner showed during that week-long stay in the intense heat of northern California was that his poise is in long supply. Despite having run no competitive races for almost a month since his victory at the NCAA championships, the second-year Baylor University student seemed undaunted by the pressure-filled atmosphere as he won both of his preliminary races before taking the Trials title with a world-leading 44.37. 

After another pause of three weeks, Wariner journeyed from North America for the first time in his life, as part of the US Olympic squad. An intermediate stop for a team challenge meeting in Munich’s Olympic Stadium produced a most impressive European debut. Within a ninety-minute period, Wariner won the 400 in 44.91 while strolling the final five metres, and then contributed a 45.2 lap to the US team’s 4x400 relay victory.

The rest of the Olympic saga is now well known. Adorned in his trademark sunglasses but in a not-so usual come-from-behind win - one of the few times this season he has seen the back side of a rival - Warriner stopped the clock in a personal-best 44.00, the eighth time he has dipped under the 45-second level.

At the post-competition press conference, Wariner revealed sang-froid atypical of a freshly minted gold medallist and no outward signs of emotional whiplash, even though the slow-paced Wariner life of last January bore little resemblance to the late-August version.

“After the race, it was the greatest feeling I’ve felt in my whole life. Just knowing that I’m only 20 years old, and I came out here and won the gold medal,” Wariner said, still wearing the olive wreath presented to him at the medal ceremony, perhaps out of a somewhat amusingly naïve sense of duty. “It was a great honour being out here representing my country, and going 1-2-3 with my team-mates,” he said of the American medal sweep, the first since the Seoul Games of 1988.

That Wariner dispatched the rest of the world in the Olympic Stadium with such remarkable composure on that memorable Monday evening is as much a reflection of the Wariner persona as it is of the skilful mentoring given him by Clyde Hart, his coach of less than two years and the head track coach at Baylor University for the past 41 seasons.

Not coincidentally it was Hart who took a young Michael Johnson out of a Dallas high school in the mid-1980s, and turned him into the pre-eminent long sprinter of our age. Again Hart had to go no farther than the Dallas metropolitan area to find the man who would assume Johnson’s Olympic 400m crown.

As incredible as it may seem now, Hart’s acceptance of Johnson as a stipend athlete was regarded at the time as a calculated risk. Unlike Wariner, whose high school reputation was supported by two Texas state titles in the 200 and 400, and times of 21.17 (20.48w) and 45.57, Johnson had compiled no such record at that stage of his life. His 200 best of 21.30, and no experience in the 400, earned him a cachet as a rather ordinary sprinter.

In short, Wariner came to Hart as a ready-made runner, much more so than Johnson was upon completing high school.

Whereas Johnson was a one-sport athlete, Wariner had played football ever since the fifth class. Running was only a spring-season fitness diversion from football, the sport tantamount to a second religion in Texas.

Wariner’s willowy physique had caused him no problems with the contact sport in high school, but stepping up to the university version of football could have seen him meeting up with behemoths capable of inflicting week-long headaches, and more. It’s difficult for a Texas kid to give up football, the one sport which commands full respect in the Lone Star State, but Wariner’s move to Baylor was as a track-only athlete.

Considering his accomplishments in the past days, Wariner’s first year at Baylor must be regarded as modest by comparison. He reached his best time of the year, a noteworthy 45.13 at a competition in Arizona in mid-April, with most of the university team’s outdoor schedule still ahead. Nearing the season’s end, he finished last in the NCAA Midwest regional competition, the gateway through which athletes must pass enroute to the NCAA Championships.

Wariner later managed to salvage his season somewhat, with a second-place finish at the US Junior Championships, leading to a silver medal at the Pan Am Junior Championships in Barbados a few weeks later. Perhaps this trip to the West Indies, home to so many top exponents of the one-lap event, was the spark that pushed him to another level in 2004.

Another may have been the close friendship he forged with his Baylor team-mate, Darold Williamson, during their first year together, and the only runner to defeat him in a 400m race this season.

Wariner admitted at the US Trials that, despite his win, he suffered an empty feeling when Williamson missed an Olympic spot with his fourth-place finish in 44.70, only 0.01 from the 44.69 of Derrick Brew.

“I wish Darold and I could have gone 1-2, but he still ran a great race. Hopefully he'll be part of the relay team,” said Wariner, almost wistfully, after the US Trials. Wariner got his wish a few days later, as Williamson capped off the American’s gold-medal 4x400m performance in a near-Olympic record. 

The format of a Wariner race - running hard for the first 200m and then maintaining speed and momentum the rest of the way - is the same formula Hart used successfully with Johnson.

Hart however also knows that he cannot fully overlay this template on top of Wariner, because he doesn’t have Johnson’s 200m speed. Nevertheless, the master coach had nothing but praise for the way his charge constructed the gold-medal performance.
"It was a perfectly executed race” was Hart’s critique of his protégé’s tactics in the final. “His 200 split was exactly what we wanted (21.3), he waited to make his move like he wanted, and he brought it home like he wanted. That's one of his great attributes - he's got a clock in his head."
Wariner also admitted that his usual habit of taking a big lead over the first 200 was altered for the final. “I had a chance to break 44,” he said, “but the way the wind was, I had to adjust my race a little.”

If there was any frustration over the agonising result of 44.00, ever so close to the ultra-elite sub-44 region of the event, Wariner kept it to himself. 

“I wouldn’t say I was disappointed. I just won the Olympic gold. I can’t be disappointed with my time. I have years to come. Breaking 44 will come some day, and when that day comes, I hope I can continue to keep breaking 44.”

Becoming the eighth-fastest 400m runner of all-time with his victory, Wariner also now reigns as the best of those not of African descent, but it’s a topic he feels uncomfortable discussing repeatedly.

“I’ve lost count of all of the times it has happened, going all the way back to high school,” he said of questions put to him about the racial stereotypes associated with 400m runners. “I don’t let it bother me or let it affect the way I run”.

Even in politically correct America, the subject arose after his win at the US Trials, and his new team-mate Otis Harris chimed in to make a bipartisan statement on the subject.

"Race has nothing to do with it,” declared Harris to the American reporters. “I'm so glad when people take down stereotypes. That's one of the most important things in athletics, and our attitude in our country, and that's what Jeremy's doing."

Credit Jeremy Wariner for using the vast Olympic stage to start putting the subject to rest.

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 3 - 2004