Columnist Dean Juipe: Ridiculous claim mars Bailey’s feat

Dean Juipe

Friday, June 6, 1997 | 5:47 a.m.

OF ALL the nerve.

The gall ... the audacity. The unsportsmanlike conduct.

This Donovan Bailey fellow really takes the cake.

And Michael Johnson's manager was right there to call him on it.

Good for him. Good for Clyde Hart. He has, as it's popular to say, pushed the envelope.

Except he has pushed it toward a level of stupidity heretofore never seen in organized sports. He has taken whining to an uncharted ground.

He deserves an award, or at least a position in professional wrestling. There, the ability to make up excuses and offhandedly present them as fact has an appreciative audience.

Take a bow, Clyde Hart.

And then take a seat in the corner. Oh yeah, and here, put this dunce cap on. It's only fitting for a man who actually claims Bailey is to blame for Johnson supposedly pulling up lame during their 150-meter match race Sunday in Toronto.

Bailey won the race and the extra $1 million that went with it. He won it easily, charging out of the blocks and then cruising to the finish line, pausing along the way to see what happened to his rival.

When he looked back, Bailey saw Johnson holding his left leg. A hotly anticipated showdown between the world's two fastest men had turned into a blowout.

Bailey blew him away.

Somehow, Hart saw that as Johnson being wronged.

"(Bailey's coach) ordered Donovan to go take him out hard and get Michael hurt," said Hart, throwing reason to the wind.

These are sprinters, right? And sprinters covering a mere 150 meters are automatically expected to not only "come out hard" but run to their absolute maximum speed the entire distance of the race. If you were head to head against anyone in a 150-meter race, let alone against a man who holds the world record at 200 meters, your only chance to win would be to go as fast as you could right from the start.

Yet Hart thought that was unfair.

"Very unprofessional," he somehow called it. "That burns me up."

Gee, Clyde, what did you expect Bailey to do? See Johnson get off to a bad start and then in a demonstration of unequivocal compassion, ease off the accelerator just so Johnson could recover and perhaps make a race of it?

Hart's disjointed analysis leads to this conclusion: He was a boy who took his ball and went home when his playmates got the better of him.

Modern dictionaries could simply run Hart's photo under the heading "poor loser." He has become the definitive crybaby.

Johnson not only lost, it was apparent in the first second or two of the race he was going to lose badly. Rather than be caught in Bailey's draft, Johnson probably quit and feigned the leg injury, which is what Bailey charged immediately afterward.

For Johnson's manager to test the public's gullibility by absolving his man and laying the blame on Bailey was both funny and a disgrace.

It reeked of Hart having an ulterior, wrestling-like motive. Did someone say rematch?