GOAT set for pastures new

American sprinter Maurice Greene had a tattoo emblazoned on his shoulder titled 'GOAT' or the 'Greatest Of All Time' - now history will have to decide whether he was as he announced he had hung up his spikes after a glittering career.

Despite taking the title of the tattoo from a biography of Muhammad Ali there was always the element of the prize fighter about the athlete known as the 'Kansas Comet'.

At the age of 33 he found that even he could not stave off the passage of time and three years of almost constant injury to try and make a third Olympics later this year, and add a third 100m medal to his tally of Olympic champion in 2000 and a courageous third in 2004.

"Injuries are every sprinter's nightmare and I seem to have been constantly battling them over the past three seasons," said Greene.

"So I have decided to retire from the sport that I love and which has given me so much over the past decade."

Greene also has given much to the sport over the same period, ever since having sat on the sidelines and watched Canada's Donovan Bailey take Olympic gold in Atlanta in 1996 he got his father to drive him to Los Angeles and plead with coaching great John Smith to take him on.

Smith agreed and added yet another super talent to his elite stable which included charismatic Trinidadian Ato Boldon, then his star coming off the back of two bronzes in the 1996 Olympics.

However, while the sensitive Boldon's form declined Greene's went from strength to strength and within a year he had seen off his bitter rival Bailey in dethroning the world 100m champion in Athens wearing appropriately enough golden shoes.

At the time it was not the elder statesman Greene that shone through but more the trashtalking callow youngster from Kansas, who dissed Bailey at the post race conference leading a clearly unfit Bailey to reply memorably 'Donovan Bailey don't lie down for anybody'.

Despite that Bailey was never again to find the wherewithal to stop Greene's momentous rise to the top and the American was to add the world record - 9.79sec in 1999 in Athens at a Grand Prix meeting - and the Olympic title in 2000 in Sydney.

Two other world titles came his way in the 100m - in Seville in 1999 and Edmonton in 2001 - and the world 200m crown in 1999 while challenger after challenger faded in his wake.

Several like Bailey simply could not come back from injuries while others left the scene in more ignominious fashion - none more so than Tim Montgomery.

The athlete from Alabama broke Greene's world record while his compatriot sat helplessly watching him in Paris in 2002 and while Greene's reaction sounded bitter and graceless in fact it bore more than a seed of truth.

"I laughed when I saw he had taken my record. I never knew he could run as fast as that, he just ran the perfect race," commented Greene at the time before Montgomery was exposed as a drugs cheat and stripped of the mark.

Indeed Greene retires never having been tainted by the tag drugs cheat, no mean feat when not only Montgomery but Justin Gatlin - who equalled Asafa Powell's mark - too has been disgraced.

While all the golds weigh heavily as his legacy to the sport, his bronze medal in the 2004 Games - behind Gatlin and the now totally out of form and stablemate of the winner, Shawn Crawford - was a symbol of the greatness of the man.

Just two years after breaking his leg in a motorbike crash he summoned up all his waning powers to mix it with the best in his event.

However, even he can still not believe that he has endured through one of the toughest sports in the business.

"It is now more than 11 years since I packed my bags and, with the help of my father, drove to Los Angeles in a bid to fulfil my sprinting dreams," he said.

"Never, then, would I have believed that it would be an adventure that would last so long, delivering Olympic gold medals, world titles, and world records along the way.

"Now, though, I have reached journey's end."

For many it's been a journey worth going along with, sometimes bumpy, but never dull and the sport will be the poorer for the most famous character to have come out of Kansas since Dorothy went on her search for the Wizard of Oz.

by Pirate Irwin, AFP