Overall Grand Prix favourite Johnson faces a final hurdle
Sean Wallace-Jones for the IAAF
8 September 2001 – Melbourne, Australia – Just 36 hours before he faces the chance to earn the biggest pay packet of his career, high hurdle champion Allen Johnson is as relaxed and laid back as can be.

30-year-old Johnson has had one of the best years of his career in 2001, he has won World Championship gold, been victorious in the requisite five IAAF Golden League meetings necessary to win a share of the 50kg of gold of the Jackpot and comes to Melbourne with a gold medal from the Goodwill Games in Brisbane earlier in the week and as favourite to win the Overall Grand Prix and take home another $150,000 dollars if he is the winner in the men’s 110 metre hurdles on Sunday.

He is relaxed because that is the man’s philosophy. He loves his event and Sunday’s race will be just that for him, another race even though the stakes are much higher than average: “I am staying relaxed about it,” he says. “I am just going to go out there and run my race.”

“It would be nice, but I think that my approach to this meet is that I have never won it before. I have never been in the Grand Prix Final before and so that is why I have come here, to see if I can pull it off. If I win this one I will have won all of the majors this year.”

Allen Johnson is not so focused on the money: “I’ll be happy if I get it, but at this point I don’t have it. At the moment it is not even reality.”

Johnson’s year started badly but could not have ended better.

“I have had a really great year, especially if you consider my indoor season. I injured my ankle in January and could not run at all for four months. My first day of practice was 30 April. When I had to start that late I had pretty much written off the year. I thought that it would be too late for the Nationals so I would just ride over those and get ready for Europe.

“But I decided that I would give it a try and then everything came together for me fairly quickly. I had a really good race at the outdoor Nationals so that boosted my confidence and I really worked on my race for the World Championships. Everything was geared for the Worlds, to be at my best at the Worlds.

“Coming out of the Worlds I have just kept on that strength.”

Johnson has no special plans if he is successful, other than a couple of weeks relaxation at home before he gets back into training and starts to prepare for the indoor season.

“I will just save the money, save for the future.”

Johnson’s major goal for next year is to attempt to better Colin Jackson’s world record of 12.91 that has stood since 1993 and he is confident that he can do it.

“I just have to stay healthy. If I can be healthy for eight or nine months then I can do it.”

Despite the longevity of the record, Johnson does not see it as being out of reach.

“It is not unattainable. I think that this is the beauty of this event that all of the top guys in the event are capable of reaching that world record. I do not see it happening on Sunday but I would not be that shocked if somewhere down the line one of the guys did it. Of course it will be hard, but my coach would tell you that if I had been fit in 1999 I would have done it. Last year I would not have because of injury. The Olympic Trials gave me a lot of confidence, I ran 12.97 and I felt that probably the Olympics would be the stage where I would do it, then I was injured and had to take a lot of time off and it just was not my day.”

Despite Johnson’s confidence, the world record holder himself is not so sure about his record falling in the near future.

“No-one today is consistent enough, including myself” laughs Colin Jackson, who at 34 years old is planning to retire next year to pursue a career in TV production, hopefully after winning another European title. “To get that record you have to be consistent and you really need a group of four or five athletes who are close to that time and who are going to push you to excel.

“I cannot see anyone there today who can do it. I know how hard it was to produce that 12.91, how hard I worked for it and how much it meant to me and I think just what would be need to go to, say 12.89… and I do not think anyone today has that.”

Johnson is nonetheless convinced: “You have to obviously put together the right race and not think about the clock. I think it makes it really difficult when you are thinking too much about it. You forget what you are out there to do, that is run your best race.

“Throughout my entire career, I have noticed that whenever I have thought about a time I didn’t really run it. There were times when I thought about running fast and I did it but my best races have been when I have concentrated on my technique and what I had to do. When I focused on those things then it tended to be a much better race.

“I do not really care what the time is. The most important thing is to get across the line first. To do that I know that getting out I need to this that I don’t start popping up. I am going through the technique over and over in my head.”

That technique won Allen gold in Edmonton, despite his hitting nine of the ten hurdles in the race. He explains:

“99 percent of people watching in the stands do not understand, they think that you are racing and knocking the hurdles over, they do not understand the difference between hitting the hurdle with the bottom of your foot and when you hit it with your hamstring or your knee. A hurdler or somebody who really knows the hurdles will understand the difference, whereas other people will think ‘Oh he knocked it down, that is something he is doing wrong’.

“That is not always true. When you see me racing you will see that sometimes I knock over the hurdle and it does nothing to my race and other times it throws me off. That is when I have done something wrong. It is all about how you hit the hurdles.

“In Edmonton there was only one hurdle that I hit that threw me off and that was the ninth hurdle. I hit it with the bottom of my foot and it stood me up, with the other ones I just tipped them over.”

Looking to the future of the high hurdles event, there appears to be a dearth of new talent coming into the sport and both Johnson and Jackson have their own opinions about this. Of the two, Jackson is the more pessimistic: “there is nobody, except maybe Anier Garcia who looks as though they could be really outstanding. Terence Tramell is not as great as some people would have, having the speed on the flat is just not enough and there is nobody who is performing consistently well. When I was 21-22 I had already gone under 13 seconds three times and no-one else around has been able to do that.

“There is no one out there today who is consistent enough.”

For Johnson, it is all a question of time: “It take a lot of time for a hurdler to develop. This is a very technical event and it takes years to perfect that technique.

“When Mark Crear and myself started to come through neither of us started to really run fast until 94-95, when I was 23 and he was nearly 26.

“When we first started there was Greg Forster and Roger Kingdom, Tony Dees and Jack Pierce who were at the top and they were all in their early thirties. It just takes time to develop the technique.

“Ok, there are a few guys, like Garcia who will be 25 later this year who has been running low 13s and even a 12.99, so he is one with future potential, like Terence Trammell, who is 22. I think that he can be at the top, but like the rest of us he has to work on his technique a lot. Garcia already has a pretty good technique and on top of that he is tough.

“There are always a few young guys who can come through. There are a couple of young American running the Collegiates who could be good. But right now I do not really see anybody who is already there. It will depend how their training goes and how much they get beat up in competition. We all went through it. That couple of years of getting hammered.

“Anyway, I want to go through until Beijing, even if it will probably make me the oldest hurdler in an Olympics.”

And what of the great hurdlers of the past, have they been a role model for Johnson?

“There has been no-one in particular. I have spent a lot of time watching them all. I watch Colin Jackson’s world record race a lot on tape. I watch Jack and Roger Kingdom, Tony Dees and Greg Forster. I really try to pick up little details from them all.”

And Johnson is not averse to try and pick up pointers from his competitors.

“I even watch people that I have beaten, I am always looking for that one little thing that somebody else may be doing better than me, something that is going to give me an edge. I like to watch them and see and say ‘hey, this person is doing something really good, if I can add that to what I already have I can go even faster’. Maybe there is a section of the race that someone is doing something better than me, but in the end, over the whole race, I am faster.

“You always have to be thinking when you are hurdling, but above all you have to focus and concentrate. There is always something happening, even if a lot of it is instinctive. Things like trying to get off the hurdle a little faster than you did the last hurdle, that sort of thing.”

It is this attention to detail that Allen Johnson is hoping will bring hime success, and a fat paycheque on Sunday.