Bailey battles back to silence war of words

Hobbling into a sports bar, the world's fastest man clings to his crutches as he carefully negotiates his way around tables and chairs.

Canadian Olympic 100 metres champion Donovan Bailey does not look like a world record holder and, if he never races again, he will quit the sport with no regrets.

"I've done all I can in track and field. I'm not attempting to do something, I'm not attempting to live another dream. Anyone who runs track and field wants to do what I did," Bailey said in an interview.

"Track is not an end-all and be-all for me," he added, gesturing around the bar which he partly owns. "I'd go home and be a daddy, I have lots of businesses to keep me busy. It's not a big thing."

But when Bailey does retire he wants it to be on his own terms, not because of what appears to be a career-ending injury.

His target is the 2000 Sydney Olympics but as the millennium Games draw closer, Bailey adds a caveat. If Canada wins a bid for track and field's world championships in 2001, then that will be the date.

"It's something I feel is my right to finish the way I want to finish," said Bailey, who set the world record at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

So Bailey, undergoes another day of rehabilitation, more weights, more hours in the swimming pool and on specialised machines aimed at repairing a ruptured Achilles' tendon, partly to fulfil his agenda and partly to prove people wrong.

As he shows on the track, Bailey recovers at high speed. Told by doctors he would spend three months in a cast, Bailey shed the cumbersome device in two weeks.

"I like challenges and this is just another one. It's another time a lot of people are saying it can't be done," he said. "I say, wait."

In a year plagued by injuries, beginning with a bone spur on his left heel in January to the season-ending Achilles' rupture in September, Bailey still clocked 9.93 seconds at the Canadian national championships in August.

Although well off his world record of 9.84 he believes it was proof that he is still the best sprinter in the world.

"I'd like to see what I can do one day healthy," he said.

Healthy days have been few and far between for the Canadian. Since December he has been in a car accident, suffered back and shoulder injuries, and torn a quadriceps muscle in addition to the bruised heel and Achilles' injury. The rash of injuries has prompted speculation that at 30 his best is behind him. Defeats in several races this season by younger runners and their brash declarations have fuelled the talk.

In August, Bailey finished seventh at the Goodwill Games in New York and was all but written off to the glee of outspoken rivals Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon.

"Any of the top sprinters in the world who don't believe I can do it are going to have a problem because I've beaten them all. In 1998, I've beaten everyone," Bailey said dismissively.

He was particularly contemptuous of Trinidad's world 200 champion Ato Boldon, who won the Commonwealth Games 100 title last month, and has been edging closer to the Canadian's world record.

"He cracks at every 100 metre championships," Bailey scoffed. "It's about stepping up and running when it matters."

Supremely confident, Bailey swats away criticism from his competitors and detractors alike, but admitted this year the trashtalking and hyperbole of track and field had affected his focus.

The Goodwill Games was an example.

"I got caught up in the things that were being said by the other less intelligent competitors," he said with a wry grin.

"I was beating up on myself on the track to get there, to get in shape," he recalled. "It was frustrating for me to know I couldn't train as well I usually do."