Wariner does it again!
How do you thrust a niche sport into mainstream media? You need a high-impact athlete who bursts onto the scene with pure domination combined with style and grace. Did anybody pay attention to cycling before Lance Armstrong starting winning the Tour de France every year? Not really. Golf is a little more of a mainstream sport but it still caters to a niche market. Tiger Woods’s arrival turned it into a national craze and the winnings that golfers make at major tournaments have skyrocketed since. Then of course is my personal favorite example: Michael Johnson. Of course he was aided by Olympic hype, but his pure domination of the 400m event for an entire decade and mind-boggling world record in the 200m at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics pushed the sport of track and field as deep into the media as it has ever been. During the height of his popularity around the ‘96 Olympics, they even put on a made for TV track event between Johnson and the then Olympic champion in the 100m Donovan Bailey.
Since Johnson’s retirement in 2000 though, his popularity and consequently the popularity of the sport has faded. Judging by the recent crop of young 400m runners, though, I think that is about to change. Just today, the reigning Olympic champion in the 400m, Jeremy Wariner, won the 400 at the World Championships, winning in 43.93 seconds. Not only that, but he became the first athlete to break 44.00 in the 400 since Johnson himself did it in 2000 and the eighth runner to ever break the barrier in history. And oh yeah, he’s only 21 years old. By contrast, Johnson didn’t first break 44 flat until he was 24, running 43.98 in 1992.
I’ve seen many of Wariner’s races now and he continues to amaze me. He always looks like he’s in control and I’ve never seen him break down at all during the end of a race. For anybody who has run 400m races before, you know what I’m talking about. It’s during the last 100m’s of the race that you can’t avoid the lactic acid buildup. Even professional runners succumb to this problem occasionally during a bad race. Wariner never does, at least not from what I’ve seen. It’s a product of great training, great discipline, and of course great talent (Wariner went to the same college, Baylor, as Johnson and he has the same coach). I think he may start to do some great things down the road and just may be that high-impact athlete that track and field needs to bring it back into the limelight of American attention.
