London: Betrayed finally by the body which once hurtled along a track faster than any man in the world, Maurice Greene reached journey’s end this month.

At the age of 33, the 2000 Sydney Olympics 100 metres champion conceded that he could not get in shape in time for the Beijing Games and announced his retirement.

“I was getting these little nagging injuries that have just stopped me from training the way that I need to,” Greene said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles this week.

“It’s a mental battle trying to come back from injuries and I don’t feel like having that mental battle with myself.”

American hegemony in the men’s 100 metres has been taken for granted since the rebirth of the Olympic Games in 1896. In reality, there have been lulls; notably in the 1920s and 1970s and again in the 1990s, the decade when Greene’s raw talent first became apparent in his home town of Kansas City.

Greene came up the hard way. In Kansas City, he worked in fast food outlets, emptied trucks and tore tickets at a movie theatre. Frustrated by his lack of progress in athletics, he decided in 1996 to drive to Los Angeles with his father Ernest to train with John Smith, by common consent the best sprint coach in the world.

“I just told myself I needed a change,” Greene recalled. “If I really wanted to do something I had to go to someplace else. I decided to go to John Smith.

“He worked me very hard. He asked me what I wanted to do and I wanted to be the best in the world.”

Training with the equally competitive Trinidadian Ato Boldon, who was to finish second to the American in Sydney, Greene set out to attain his goal.

(Reuters)