Jeremy Wariner

World championships, 400m final, Helsinki, 2005
"Really, there was only one man in the race from the word go.” Steve Cram calls it perfectly. The 400m final has taken place on two levels. One is contested by mortals who push each other forward, a thrilling chase won at the last by the American Andrew Rock, for silver. Always ahead of them, one man whose only opponent is history.

Jeremy Wariner is 23 years old and speaks with the drawl shared by many of his fellow Texans. He also possesses the matter-of-fact confidence customary to phenomenal sporting talents. He is the only man in the world today running 400m in under 44 seconds - the time that stands like a barrier at the door of greatness. At the start of a summer that peaks in Osaka, Japan, and the defence of his world title, Wariner is asked if his only opponent will be the clock, and honesty beats modesty to the tape. “At this moment, I’m the only one that’s broken 44, so if the time’s going to be under 44, I feel I’m going to be running against the clock,” he says. “I’m going to be running against LaShawn Merritt and Gary Kikaya and they’ll be my toughest competitors. I have a target on my back they’re going to be chasing, but I can’t be worried about them. I’m running against the clock.”

Log on to his website and you see a picture of Wariner in the middle of the smoothest stride in sprinting, next to a number, next to a question mark that makes it a mission statement. 43? Wariner has set a target of 43sec that is beyond Everest for a quarter-miler. Since winning gold at the Athens Olympics in 2004 and breaking 44sec for the first time at the world championships, he has had to invent new goals. 43 is the only one that exists as an abstract. The rest have a name: Michael Johnson. The world record holder over 400m (43.18sec) and 200m (19.32sec) is now Wariner’s agent. He suggested Wariner make a whistle-stop in Edinburgh on the way back from competition in Holland – run a coaching clinic, make a little withdrawal by plugging the Bank of Scotland’s latest investment in Scottish athletics and talk to a few reporters before flying home. Johnson arranges the schedule that sees Wariner crisscross the globe, plans the attack on the titles and times that have become his only quarry, and plots the theft of his own legacy.

“I’m trying to achieve everything he did and surpass it,” Wariner says. He speaks about Johnson without reverence, saying he had barely heard of him when he got into athletics late, in his teens. “Last year I was trying to run more 43s [in a single season] than he did. I missed that. I ran two, he ran four. Hopefully this year I’ll be able to do it. Try to break the world record, try to get my 200 time down and win more world championships and Olympics than he did. He’s glad to see me striving to be better, especially when I’ve already won a world championship and an Olympics. Once you win that title it’s hard to stay motivated but it helps that I’m trying to break his records. That’s keeping me motivated throughout my career.”

Johnson may be less impressed with Wariner’s eating habits. He enjoys fast food, although he knows he has to reduce his intake. “I’m gradually getting away from fast food,” he says. “I’m always going to eat it, but I have gone from eating it almost every day to maybe twice a week. When I’m at track meets the hotel provides food for the athletes, but if I don’t get enough or I don’t like what I had, we’ll go and find the nearest McDonald’s or Burger King. I’m not going to go somewhere and not like the food and sit there starving.”

Texas state high school championships, 2001
WARINER is 17, a junior at Lamar High School in Texas. An early interest in soccer has long since waned, and he blames his failure on the basketball court on his excessive speed. He’s still playing baseball but it looks like it’s going to be between American football and the track. Except the track has never felt like this before. “It was my first time at state,” recalls Wariner. “That was the biggest crowd I’d ever run in front of, 18,000 people at a high school meet. I ended up third because I didn’t run my race. I had gone out too hard and didn’t have enough for the end. The guy who was second was a guy I had beat all season. From that point on I had to stay focused on my race, not how many people are at the meet or who is in the race.”

When he left school in 2002, Wariner chose track and that meant Johnson’s alma mater, Baylor University. The man who coached Johnson to gold, Clyde Hart, assumed he would never see a comparable talent. He was wrong. Wariner began the 2004 season as a collegiate outsider for Team USA and ended it as Olympic champion. He won it as an amateur, in 44.01sec. Only when he got back to Baylor with the gold medal round his neck did he become a professional athlete.

The focus he lost at the state high school meet has been harnessed since and is why he runs in shades. “The sunglasses keep me focused on what’s straight ahead, because you can’t see what’s next to you,” he says.

“It keeps me looking forward. I realised I was more focused than without them. My competitors can’t look into my eyes. They can’t get in my head.”

Golden League, Rome, 2006
WARINER has dominated the 400m for two years, but never like this. He destroys a world-class field in one of six victories that turn the Golden League series into a personal conquest of Europe. As he burns them off, the commentators start talking about the mark set by Johnson in Seville in 1999, a time that has mocked every 400m runner since the great man retired in 2001 - when Wariner was getting spooked by 18,000 people in Texas. As he nears the line, an official steps in front of the photo-finish technology that provides snap timings, so nobody knows exactly what he has done. There is a wait of about a minute before the time of 43.62sec comes up. A personal best, seventh quickest of all-time (Johnson has four of the top six) and the fastest since Johnson set the record eight years ago. “In Rome I was at ease. I didn’t force it, I didn’t tighten up at the end of the race,” Wariner recalls. “Last year I got down to 43.6 from 43.9, that was a big improvement. Once you get in to the 43s it’s hard to drop your time. One-hundredth of a second is a great improvement, so going from 43.9 to 43.6 was the biggest achievement last year.”

Four weeks ago, Wariner competed on the track in Osaka that will host the world championships in August and ran 44.02sec. He was persuaded that when he returns to Japan he can defeat not just the athletes on either side of him but the one who guards the only trophy Wariner does not possess. “The track is real, real fast,” Wariner says. “It’s a whole other surface from anything I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of hard, but it also has some spring to it. It has grooves going from left to right on the lane so when you push off your spike is digging in to those grooves, giving you more spring. It slings your foot forward. It’s going to be worth a lot, in every event. I went 44.0 and felt comfortable, I didn’t even kick at the right moment when I should have. Once I get my strength and speed better I feel I can run a personal best at the world champs.”

Wariner is so fast and so young that time is his friend and his enemy. He has to find 18-hundredths beyond Johnson’s best to reach the magical 43sec, but who knows how long he has to look for them? “It’s hard to say. Michael was 31 when he broke the 400m record and 28 when he broke the 200m record. I could peak at 31, 32. I’m trying to go to at least 2016.”

Wariner made a commercial for Adidas that runs in the US with the tag line ‘Impossible is Nothing’. Most 400m runners would place a higher figure on the unattainable. Maybe 43. If he tags Johnson’s world record in Osaka this year, impossible will be all Jeremy Wariner has left to beat.

Chasing the 400m record

- Michael Johnson broke the 400m world record on a memorable night at the world championships in Seville in 1999. He ran 43.18sec, knocking 0.11sec off the mark set by Harry ‘Butch’ Reynolds 11 years earlier in Zurich

- It provided Johnson with an extraordinary 200m and 400m double, having broken the world record in the 200m when he ran 19.32sec at the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996

- The measure of how fast Johnson ran in Seville is that in almost eight years since he did it, Jeremy Wariner is the only athlete to go within touching distance with a time of 43.62 in Rome last year - but that is still almost half a second slower