interview Former poster boy of the track and Olympic silver medallist Roger Black analyses rivalries past and present.
By Doug Gillon
ROGER BLACK was the poster boy for a generation. He stirred feelings rarely expressed in the douce sport of athletics. “Sex on Legs” proclaimed banners at various arenas, and when the Englishman made his valedictory appearance he was still at the height of his popularity, even if his track powers were fading due to recurrent injuries.
The queue for his autograph that day in Sheffield in 1998 stretched along the home straight at the Don Valley Stadium and under the stand, then snaked its way between the TV trucks and around the car park.
Black’s cv testifies to one of the most glittering careers in British athletics. He was European junior 400 metres champion in 1985 and a double Commonwealth gold medallist in Edinburgh a year later, with individual and relay titles.
He claimed 15 major championship medals in all. He was twice European individual one-lap champion (adding three 4x400m relay golds), and twice a world relay gold medallist. Yet an individual global title eluded him.
Black surrendered the world crown in the final stride to Antonio Pettigrew in Tokyo in 1991 and then had to contend with the greatest 400m runner ever – in the world record-holder Michael Johnson.
The Texan topped the world rankings for eight successive years, once by more than a second, and never by less than 0.33. Not even Usain Bolt has a reputation to match. Johnson went eight years and 59 races unbeaten at 400m, and then came back to set a world record which has survived for 12 years.
At the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, Black was one of perhaps five competitors who knew they were running for second, and was famed for saying anyone who believed they could beat Johnson, was “an idiot”. He concentrated on his own race and took the silver medal.
Black remains much in demand, and will explain the rationale for all of that a week tonight in Glasgow. He will be talking to athletes and coaches, and will be guest of honour at the scottishathletics awards dinner.
Right now, track and field is in another era of “who’s going to be second?” If the Olympic champion and world 100m and 200m record-holder Bolt does not false start, there’s a perception that there can be only one winner when he is competing. Black, however, believes Johnson’s mantle of invincibility sat more convincingly. “The majority who race Bolt will think they’re running for second,” he says, “but the difference now is that there are two people in the world who can beat Usain Bolt.
“Three years ago if Bolt was 90%, he’d win. I don’t think that’s the case now. In Yohan Blake and Tyson Gay – if he gets back – you have two guys with whom, if they are 100% and Usain is 95%, it’s not a given. With Michael, the margins were greater. There was a gap that nobody got close to filling. No-one really threatened him over 400. He always had more in the tank. He only ran it flat out, hard, on two or three occasions. I think the gap between Michael and the rest of us was actually greater than between Usain and the rest of the world now at 100.
“I had to make a choice: do I go out to race and beat Michael – in which case the chances were I would blow up and maybe finish sixth – or run my own race? I could not do what he could; nobody else could. I did not have 19.3 for 200 in my legs, so I focused on running my perfect race, and it took a lot of effort blocking him out in the lane outside me.”
One difference between Johnson and Bolt is that there are no tactics in the 100 and 200m, no chance to respond, no scope to react to rivals, as Black acknowledged. “I lost the world title in 1991 to Pettigrew because I got sucked in, and he didn’t,” he said. “I got sucked in with a couple of guys around me who went off really quickly, and then got caught on the line.
“I’d made that mistake once, on the only occasion on which I’d a chance to be world or Olympic champion, realistically. I messed it up, so I didn’t want to mess it up with Michael. I executed my perfect race when it mattered, and thank God I did.”
Black looks back on his career without regrets. He and his wife, Julia, have twin sons, and he also has a daughter from his first marriage. He mentors athletes, is a motivational speaker and a 2012 ambassador, and he and the former javelin world record-holder Steve Backley run a company, BackleyBlack, which aims to help the corporate sector translate sporting success into day-to-day practicalities.
None of this would have happened had Black not flunked A level maths at the first sitting. Had he passed, he would have followed his father into medicine, but in the extra year he took, Black discovered he could run.
“I wanted to become a doctor, but it wasn’t my passion,” he said. “At 18, I did not know what my passion was. Then I took up athletics after I left grammar school, and it became my passion. How can I possibly regret it? I’d a great career. I fulfilled myself, which is all an athlete can do, and at 45 I make my whole living around who I was. I am incredibly blessed. It’s not a normal way to make a living, talking about the Olympics.”
n Tickets for the scottishathletics dinner can be purchased until 5pm on Thursday. E-mail mary.anderson@scottishathletics.org.uk
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