COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 10:12 p.m. ET Aug. 22, 2004

ATHENS, Greece - It says so on his right arm, just above the bicep.

G.O.A.T.

Maurice Greene had those letters etched into his skin a few months ago so they were always within reach, so he could touch them and never forget the last time people said he was done. They stand for Greatest Of All Time.

The scoreboard at Olympic stadium Sunday night said something different, though. Sorting out the fastest Olympic 100 field ever, it read:

1. Justin Gatlin, 9.85

2. Francis Obikwelu, 9.86

3. Maurice Greene, 9.87

“I don’t think there’s another sprinter out there who has accomplished the things that I have. I’m making it hard for the next person to come along and do things better than me. So until then,” Greene said afterward, “I’ll be the greatest.”

And he may be right.

The Olympic 100 is an insane pursuit. It is preceded by more posing than you’ll find at a Miss Universe contest and it’s over in less than 10 seconds. After four years of preparation, it can be decided in the time it takes to flick a light switch. Stumble out of the starting blocks, bust a stride, even twitch at the wrong moment, and there is no recovering, no matter how fast you run.

No sprinter has ever crossed the finish line first in the 100 in successive Olympics. Carl Lewis did in 1984, and then was awarded a second gold medal in 1988 after Ben Johnson was caught juiced to the gills. Only a handful of sprinters have even reached the start line in back-to-back Olympics, a feat Greene managed after his 30th birthday. The crazy thing is that he insisted he’s not done.

“It’s been a long road from where I’ve been and to come back here and compete the way I have, I’m still happy, even though I didn’t get the gold medal,” Greene said. “I’ll be back, though. It’s not the end.”

He may be right about that, too.

While Greene talked, his coach, John Smith, stood off to one side, his face impassive. He knows better than to doubt anything his best pupil says.

“One of the best finals ever,” Smith said. “I’m so glad to be coaching someone in there.”

Glad doesn’t tell the half of it.

Greene turned 30 last month, coming off two seasons devastated by injury. A quadriceps tear cost him the end of the 2001 season, a broken leg most of 2002, a bum knee much of last year. Rivals whose names he barely bothered to learn said he was done. After a lackluster race in London, the tabloids dubbed him Slo-Mo. Sunday night, against the odds, Greene turned out to be anything but that.

“My start was good. I think the middle was good,” he said.

But Greene lost touch with the leaders around 50 meters.

“Maybe that was the cause of me not getting the gold medal,” he said, “but that’s not an excuse. In the final it’s ‘may the best man win.’ May the best person who executes the best, runs the best race, win the race.”

Sprinters, like boxers, live by a code. In their racket, the meek don’t inherit anything.

So maybe only Greene knew what he had left in those old legs, how close to shot his nerves were from all those years of lightning starts and split-second finishes. Neither stopped him from taking on the hard work and pain of rehabbing those injuries, or inviting trouble by branding himself with a mark that would seem outdated before he ever set foot in Athens.

“The young guys, they ran good, but I’m not gone yet,” he said one more time. “I’m still on my way back.”

Yet there was a sense of finality as Greene crossed the finish line, grabbed an American flag and took a lap around the track. He may not be done, but bluffing is so much a part of Greene’s makeup, that he may only be fooling himself.

He trained like he hadn’t in years with an eye on these Olympics, clocking four of the 10 fastest times in the world this year, winning all four of his heats at the U.S. trials. But a generation of young guns has been gaining on him for years, and on this night they passed him, perhaps never to be caught again.

If so, maybe they learned a valuable lesson.

When Smith and Greene first hooked up in 1996, the sprinter had just quit his job at a McDonald’s in Kansas City, using the last few weeks of his salary to pay his own way to Atlanta. Greene wasn’t good enough to reach the semifinals of the U.S. national trials that summer, but he was determined to sit in the stands for the Olympic 100 final, to know what it felt like when all those cheers rained down on gold-medal winner Donovan Bailey.

The next year he and Smith went to work on that feeling. The training sessions stopped just long enough some days so Greene could finish vomiting to answer Smith’s question: “Do you want to be the fastest man in the world?”

The answer is there still, scrawled into Greene’s right arm and any man who would claim otherwise is still a long way up the track.

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