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By Rachael Blount
EUGENE, ORE.
Jon Drummond has been coaching Tyson Gay for some time now, but even he could hardly believe what he saw Sunday afternoon. "This dude needs some re-entry glasses," Drummond gushed after Gay ran the fastest 100-meter time in history. "We need to get some type of flame-retardant uniform in case he catches on fire."
As the thermometer nudged into the 90s on back-to-back days at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, Gay and his fellow sprinters -- men and women -- applied heat to the record books. Gay's wind-aided 9.68 seconds in Sunday's finals stamped him as an Olympic favorite with world record holder Usain Bolt of Jamaica. After the women's 100 on Saturday, third-place Lauryn Williams said she and her Olympic teammates -- Muna Lee and Torri Edwards -- could sweep the medals in Beijing.
The U.S. Olympic track and field team bills itself as "the hardest team to make" because of the depth of the fields and a pressure-filled format that gives Summer Games berths to the trials' top three finishers in each event. The sprinters bore that out on the meet's first weekend, and the ones who prevailed added an extra layer of anticipation for a team expected to win big in Beijing.
"I definitely saw it coming for the women," said Williams, the 2004 Olympic silver medalist in the 100 meters, of the eight women who contested the trials final. "This is the best field ever put together. The talent is amazing. I don't think the final in Beijing is going to be as strong as the final here."
Darvis Patton, third in the men's 100, echoed that sentiment. He finished in 9.84, with Walter Dix second in 9.80. Six men ran the final in under 10 seconds; in the women's final, five ran under 11 seconds.
"If you would have blinked, you would have missed it," Patton said. "For the human body to go that fast is awesome."
http://www.startribune.com/sports/olympics/22743374.html?location_refer=Outdoors
