FORMIDABLE, WITH A FRENCH ACCENT
Felicitations, Christophe Lemaitre, European 100 metres champion. The 20 year old from Aix-Les-Bains, an area of eastern France more likely to produce skiers than sprinters has justified all the promise of the last two years.
He swept away memories of his false-start DQ at the World Champs in Berlin last summer as easily as he swept past his opponents in the last 30 metres in Barcelona on Wednesday evening. Lemaitre was fastest in the heats and semis and, more importantly in the final, where he relegated defending champion Francis Obikwelu, and marginal favourite Dwain Chambers to also-rans.
No disrespect to Chambers, even if he did get busted for drugs a few years back. I’ve always liked him and feel that, similar to Ben Johnson, he was over-used as a scapegoat. But even as a fellow-Brit, a win for the big bad boy would have seemed like a blast from the past.
After all, breaking ten seconds in three successive decades, as Chambers has done, is a great achievement, but it’s time to move on. And Lemaitre is the future, at least for European sprinting.
Granted, neither 10.11sec, his winning time in Barcelona, nor his best of 9.98sec is going to give Usain Bolt, Tyson Gay or Asafa Powell (or a dozen others) any pause for reflection. But given that they are (you may have noticed) black, and Lemaitre is already being hailed as, ‘The First White Man Under Ten Seconds,’ we are going to be treated, again, to a debate which has festered for over a hundred years.
Ever since Jack Johnson pummelled a string of big hicks with glass jaws into the dust of a dozen or more boxing rings a century ago, and a racist mentality gave rise to the concept of the Great White Hope, we have been saddled with a spurious black v white debate, and not just in sport, it’s just that sport is the most easily accessible battle-ground.
I don’t know what he felt about it, but I always thought it was demeaning to refer to Nobuhara Asahara, 10.07sec in 1997 (and Olympic relay bronze in Beijing, aged 35!), as, ‘the Japanese Carl Lewis’. And when a Chinese eventually and inevitably runs sub-ten (there’s got to be a few more like Liu Xiang in a population of 1.3 billions), are we going to get the ‘Fastest Yellow Man on the Planet’?
Closer to home, far more shocking than Chambers’ defeat was the silver medal for Mark Lewis-Francis, the sort of comeback usually associated with temple veils being rent and rocks rolled away from cave entrances. Because if Chambers had become an unlikely hero, doing his time, taking it on the chin, and coming back winning, MLF, even though younger, was yesterday’s man, the champion-who-never-was.
When Lewis-Francis won the world junior 100 metres in 2000, followed that with an early-season victory over 1996 Olympic sprint champ Donovan Bailey the following year, then went sub-ten (thanks to a faulty wind-gauge) at the World Champs in Edmonton 2001, he was hyped right to the top of the Olympic rostrum. Even Bailey was inveigled into nominating MLF as a likely winner in Athens 2004.
Lewis-Francis did win gold in Athens, but it was in anchoring the British quartet to sprint relay gold. Because, apart from a couple of indoor medals (and a minor bust for cannabis), his individual sprint career went into decline in inverse proportion to his weight rise. Since both he and I come from the Black Country, the old industrial centre of the British midlands, he’ll know what I mean if I use local slang, and say he looked less like a world class sprinter than a little tunky pig.
He was only added to the British team for Barcelona as an afterthought. But, drawn next to Chambers in the final, he gave little ground to his colleague’s good start, and gradually eased up to and past Chambers, winning silver by a margin of 0.006sec, since second to fifth place (Chambers) shared the official time of 10.18sec.
So, little surprise that the fastest white dude on the planet becomes European sprint champion, but major surprise that a one-time tunk could barrel down the track to take silver.
July 30th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Hi, I’m not sure how things work where you come from, but in the States, the term “hick” is derogatory and is akin to the term “nigger.” I am not familiar with Jack Johnson or his fighting history, but I am assuming that you are implying he had success against opponents who were white, southern men, and possibly racist. Even so, that does not give you the right to use the term “hick.” Its use is counterproductive and very offensive to a large portion of hard working people.
July 31st, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Well, Pat, a bit of a sense of ’second division’ here - certainly in relation to the track results. In world terms, you’d expect most sprint finalists to be under 10/20 secs. And Lemaitre definitely needs to find himself a good barber!
As for the longer distances: 1′42 and 27′32″ in Nairobi!. Let’s not kid ourselves, we’re still way behind the Africans. Euro 1500 was particularly disappointing. Three UK finalists, just one with a chance of a medal. Why didn’t the coaches get together, tell Lancashire and the other guy to take Andy B to the bell in 2′ 40″?.. In athletics, some of us are better than others. Democracy will get you nowhere!
Best,
Tim J