MARK LEWIS-FRANCIS reflected yesterday on the moment that he secured victory for Great Britain in the men’s 4 x 100 metres here on Saturday night. If Kelly Holmes’s double had been surprising, this was astonishing. None of the four had reached an individual final here while the United States had three men — Maurice Greene, Justin Gatlin and Shawn Crawford — who had won gold medals.
“I remember looking back slightly, seeing Maurice dipping for the line, then my adrenalin rushed all the way from the bottom of my feet to the top of my mouth,” Lewis-Francis said. “It’s a crazy feeling, I am still tingling from it now. It gives me the confidence to go home and look forward to the World Championships next year.” Perhaps now, at last, Lewis-Francis can fulfil his potential.
Four years ago, at 17, Lewis-Francis rejected the opportunity to go to the Sydney Olympics to concentrate on the World Junior Championships. But, after becoming world junior champion and taking the senior bronze medal at the World Indoor Championships the next winter, his career stagnated. Now, he said, he would look at his gold medal every day to drive him forward to greater achievements.
Slick baton changes, and fresh legs, enabled Jason Gardener, Darren Campbell, Marlon Devonish and Lewis-Francis to pick up a medal that eluded all three of Britain’s individual Olympic 100 metres champions — Harold Abrahams (1924), Allan Wells (1980) and Linford Christie (1992). It was the perfect response to the criticism they had taken from Michael Johnson and Colin Jackson.
Furthermore, it spared Britain’s men from the unprecedented ignominy of failing to win a medal at an Olympic Games. And it was more than ample consolation for the World Championships in Paris last year, when Britain were stripped of the silver medal after Dwain Chambers, now banned, failed a drugs test.
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For Campbell, the Olympics have been an emotional rollercoaster. After struggling in the 100 and 200 metres, Johnson, the former Olympic 200 and 400 metres champion who is now a television analyst, accused him of feigning injury. Campbell has medical proof of his injury and he said yesterday that the matter was in the hands of his solicitor.
Given that relay running requires a close team spirit, it is a curiosity that the four men are spread far and wide across Britain. Gardener lives in Bath, Campbell in Cardiff, Devonish in London and Lewis-Francis in Birmingham. But then, their only predecessors as British Olympic sprint relay champions comprised a Welshman, a Scot, a Londoner and a Yorkshireman.
Britain won the first Olympic men’s 4 x 100 metres, staged in 1912, but defeats for the US have been rare. In the 20 Olympics in which the event had been held before these Games, the US had won on 15 occasions. The USSR took the gold twice, East Germany once and Canada once. Donovan Bailey, who helped Canada to win in 1996, having taken the 100 metres title, was impressed with the Britons.
“The Americans had the foot speed to break the world record but the Brits did exactly what they were supposed to,” Bailey said. “They had great hand-offs and Mark did not panic — he ran a hell of a last leg. They have done it as a team and they must do it individually now, but this should get all of them over the hump because they can walk around with a gold medal around their necks as Olympic champion.”
Bailey said that Lewis-Francis had run the way he told him to. “I spoke to Mark after the semi-finals and said, ‘Just let go, it’s like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.’ Some sprinters just can’t let go, they can’t run free, they are thinking about too many things. Mark left the parachute behind and now he has to do that in the individual.”