Athletics: Gatlin Powers to Sprint Gold As British Trio Fail to Reach the Final

A supreme performance from Justin Gatlin in the 100 metres saw him produce the biggest winning margin in world championship history last night.

The American ran 9.88sec to finish 0.17 ahead of Jamaica's Michael Frater. To put that into perspective it was nearly two metres, a huge distance at this level.

The absence through injury of Asafa Powell, the world record holder, robbed the race of much of its potential drama. What little doubt there was surrounded the start, where Gatlin is notoriously poor.

Once into his running he simply powered past the rest of the field. "If Asafa Powell had been in the race, it would have been much faster," said Gatlin. "I wanted to bring out the best of me - even if he wasn't there. I've got more there, most definitely. I didn't coast the race but felt I was doing enough to win it."

Frater's silver completed a good few minutes for Jamaica as at the same time Trecia Smith won the women's triple jump with a leap of 15.11 metres. In fact, the Caribbean had lots to celebrate because Kim Collins, the defending 100m champion from St Kitts and Nevis, put recent indifferent form behind to claim the bronze in the same time as Frater.

The winning margin of Gatlin, a 23-year-old from Brooklyn, surpassed the 0.14 that Carl Lewis won by at the inaugural championships here in 1983. The results book shows Lewis won by a bigger margin from Ray Stewart in 1987 but that was only after Ben Johnson, who had originally crossed the line first, was disqualified several years later.

Gatlin now joins an exclusive club of Lewis, Linford Christie, Donovan Bailey and Maurice Greene of holding the world and Olympic titles simultaneously.

"It was great to add another gold medal to my collection," he said. "I still felt very emotional before the race but I just had to get out there and represent the USA."

Among those watching was Greene, a three-time world champion who failed to qualify for the US team in the individual event. He clearly has no future as an astrologer after predicting Britain's three sprinters would all reach the final. Mark Lewis-Francis did not get beyond the second round while Marlon Devonish and Jason Gardener were both knocked out in the semi-final.

Only Gardener could claim to be unlucky after finishing fifth in his heat in 10.08, his best for five years, but missing out on the final by a hundredth of a second to Collins, leaving him thinking what might have been. It was only the second time in the 22-year history of these championships Britain was unrepresented in the final. It follows last year's Olympics when a Briton also failed to reach the final for the first time since 1976.

It is hard to remember it was only five years ago that the likes of Greene and Bailey were predicting that by this time Lewis-Francis would be the event's dominant force. Instead, this year is set to go down as memorable only for him losing the silver medal he won in the 60m at the European indoor championships in Madrid in March after testing positive for cannabis.

If Dave Collins, the performance director of UK Athletics, does not seriously address the problem Lewis-Francis is in danger of becoming the biggest waste of talent in British sport since Paul Gascoigne. At 22, he is the same age as Powell and only slightly younger than Gatlin so can no longer claim youth is preventing him fulfilling his potential. And as this was his third world championship, inexperience cannot be rolled out as an excuse. Instead, he blamed never having fully recovered from the hamstring injury he suffered at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. The verdict from Powell was brutally harsh, though probably fair. "Mark needs to train harder," he said.