Interview: Tim Montgomery

All summer, those of us who like to see people running very fast indeed only had eyes for two men. Maurice Greene and Dwain Chambers ran in a series of carefully orchestrated showdowns: the Yank against the Brit, the reigning champ against the great pretender. The pleasure was all the greater because Greene was on the wane, whereas Dwain was looking mean. Four times Chambers beat the then world record holder. The stage was set for his final crowning when, in Paris in September, as if from nowhere, someone else hurtled past the pair of them, running faster than any man ever had before, including those assisted by their medicine cabinet.

Tim Montgomery swished through in 9.78 seconds, a speed so fast and unexpected it left the watching world blinking in disbelief. Who was this man? How come the also-ran, the bloke there to make up numbers, had suddenly scorched home in that sort of time?

"Hey, I've been around a while," says the man himself, still floating on success. "I've known for a long while I could run that fast. It was just a matter of time."

Until he left Greene and Chambers floundering in his wash, Montgomery was chiefly recognised as the significant other in the life of Marion Jones, a woman with more championship gold medals than most of us have fingers. The ribald joke doing the athletics circuit about who finishes first took on a new significance when the couple became officially the fastest pair on earth, the owners between them of the women's and men's 100m records.

"I don't run against Marion, no," says Montgomery, chuckling. "She is not someone who likes to be beat."

Montgomery is back home in South Carolina at the moment, resting after his magnificent season. Though for a workaholic like him, resting is a relative term; he has just returned from a two-hour session in the gym.

"You need a strong frame, just like a car," he says. "You couldn't put a Ferrari engine in a Volkswagen."

The Ferrari analogy is apt. When he lines up at the start of a race, Montgomery displays the sleek, purposeful lines of a formula one car, whereas some of his rivals have all the pumped-up musculature of an outsized sports utility vehicle. In part, that was why so many of us failed to notice him: he was lost in the shadow of giants.

"I've actually been strong from a kid, because I grew up on a farm," he says, his soft, almost feminine voice still carrying the accent of his country upbringing. "So I was helping round the place, carrying stuff, doing weight training effectively from an early age. The strength I developed in South Carolina put me in the position where I didn't need that much building up."

He can't recall a time, he says, when he couldn't run fast. As a child, he remembers the thrill of gradually realising he would win any chase. At school he was a fixture in all the teams - baseball, football, basketball - picked for his electric pace rather than any discernible skill.

"What I wanted to be when I was a kid was a football player," he recalls. "But I couldn't gain the bulk that was needed because I didn't know the right weight training. I was always way too small for football. If I had the knowledge then I have now about nutrition, about weight rooms, about my body, then I'm sure I could have built myself up enough to have played football. I wanted to. But I'm glad I didn't. Running has become my love now."

Once he began to concentrate on sprinting, Montgomery's potential was immediately obvious. He was only 17 when he first ran under 10 seconds. At 19, he had run 9.96.

"Everything is a combination of what you do and what you have. It's very hard to build a sprinter. Those who try to do that stuff usually get caught," he says. "From the moment I ran 9.92 two years ago, I knew I would break the world record. The knowledge I gained of myself and my capability that day made me think, how hard can it be to gain the other 15 hundredths of a second I'm looking for? How hard can that be, man? It takes more time to say my first name than that."

There was, presumably, more to it than merely saying it can't be hard.

"At the world championships [in Edmonton in 2001] I was way down, way down. Yet you look at the times over the last 40 metres and I was closing fast on Maurice Greene, who was running 9.79. How could that be? Because at 30 metres he was way in front of me. I said to myself: 'Man, if I can ever improve my start, this guy can never beat me.'"

And so, with the aid of his coaches ("everyone needs a support team") Montgomery set about breaking down and then reconstructing his start. Meanwhile, there was also the mental conditioning.

"That was the hardest part," he claims. "If I don't believe it myself, then no one else is. Ain't nobody knows what I feel like when I go to train. Ain't nobody knows where my head's at when I'm on that line. You're on your own, man. If you don't believe, nobody else will do it for you."

It was advice, he says, from the most elevated of sources that finally helped everything click.

"Michael Johnson," he says of the great 400m runner. "He told me: 'When you start concentrating on yourself, Maurice Greene will never beat you again. Forget all the other guys and concentrate on your game.'"

Which can't be easy with all the posturing and posing, pushing and shoving that goes on before the start of a race. Often it looks like a row of peacocks out there on the line. Except for Montgomery, a sprinter distinctive for his lack of ostentation.

"They say I sprint so fast because I walk so slow," he says. "A lot of people expect sprinters to be boastful, arrogant, make a lot of noise. But that's not me. I'm Tim. I show what I've got when I step on the track."

Which is exactly what he did in Paris. He was motivated, he adds, by the very fact that all eyes were trained elsewhere that day.

"It drove me, all the attention my rivals were getting. I couldn't believe the way every race was just about Maurice and Dwain," he says, pronouncing Chambers's first name Day-wain, as in Constable's Hay Wain. "I ran 18 races this seresident Saddam's surprise pardon may also have been an attempt to assuage western leaders, particularly in Washington and London. Under the terms of the punitive sanctions first imposed 12 years ago Iraq is obliged to release all Kuwaiti prisoners of war.

The US and Britain have also recently condemned Iraq's human rights record. President Saddam might have believed that yesterday's announcement would lessen criticism of his regime at the moment it faces its greatest threat.

Also seen as part of a drive to improve its image, Iraq yesterday handed Kuwait the first batch of 2 tonnes of official documents it seized when it invaded.

"We have taken official delivery of 30 boxes on Sunday and the work will continue on Monday," a Kuwaiti official told Reuters.

Iraq said earlier this month that it planned to return government papers missing from Kuwait since 1990.

Most prisoners released yesterday appeared to be thoroughly grateful to President Saddam.

Hundreds onprecedented.

Several inmates from Baghdad's notorious Abu Gharib jail, which houses Iraq's most important political prisoners, were being set free last night. It was not clear who, or how many, would stay behind bars.

Although there has been a series of limited pardons for criminals in recent years, yesterday's announcement was the first time in President Saddam's 23-year reign that political prisoners had been set free.

"All jailed prisoners, detainees and sentenced fugitives for political reasons are granted a complete, cop your rhythm, a second's gone. I'm convinced I can run faster because in Paris I did not run the perfect race. My coach reckons I could have run 9.73 if I hadn't messed up with my hand at the start."

It must be pretty galling, though, to break the world record and then be told you could have run faster if you hadn't screwed up.

"That's where Marion comes in," he says. "The only people who really understand what you are going through are your rivals, and you can't expect sympathy from them. Not eveIraqi leader courts support at home and attempts to placate west with widespread prison amnesty.umented dozens of chilling accounts of torture, which included prisoners having their eyes gouged out, being severely beaten or subjected to brutal electric shocks.

A new punishment introduced two years ago meant that anyone caught criticising President Saddam in public had their tongue cut out.

The main targets of the regime have included Shi'ite clerics from the south, who have long been seen as a threat to the minority ruling Sunni community.

Others arrested have included Kurds from the north accused of separatist ambitions or army and security officers suspected of plotting against the regime. master (0870 444 4440).