Michael Johnson is doing a lap in his mind and it has taken him to a place he does not like to go.
It is to do with a conversation he has had plenty of times before, and more regularly since he went on social media last year to post a pair of pictures.
One shows him on a track in Atlanta in 1996, with his arms outstretched at the moment he became the only man to ever win 400m and 200m gold medals at the same Olympics. The other was snapped in his garden in California and he is wearing the very same USA vest in the very same pose with the very same muscle tone.
Legendary American Olympian Michael Johnson gave Sportsmail an exclusive interview
‘No Photoshop,’ he says, and it is why folk have taken to asking him the obvious. They want to know what he could do if he pushed out his chest and rotated through those short strides one more time.
They want to know how much he has retained in the 21 years since he ended his career as the most dominant and compelling figure in track and field.
‘People ask that,’ he says. ‘They’re like, “How fast are you now?” I think completely differently to that. I think, “How slow am I now?” I haven’t run for a time since I retired. I have no interest in knowing how much slower I am now than then.’
But he has a think anyway. Not about the 200m — that is a non-starter. ‘A hamstring would go,’ he laughs. But then there is the 400m.
He could blitz that in 43.18sec at his fastest, and maybe, he says with some nudging, he could do an OK lap with some work. But he gives nothing on what the time might be. With more nudging there is still nothing. Until finally a nibble.
Johnson's Instagram post commemorating his 1996 glory at the Olympics prompted questions about what kind of speed the former sprinter could manage now on the track
The American great retired in 2001 as an iconic and powerful figure in track and field's history
‘We’ll never find out but I’ll give you this much — for under 50 seconds I’d have to train for it.’
He had a stroke in 2018. He will be 54 in September. He never was like other people.
The old champion is doing one of his short, deep chuckles. For the briefest of moments he has been imagining how it would have looked if his finest moment had not been so fine.
It has been 25 years since Atlanta, almost to the day, and Johnson has been going over all of it. The food poisoning, the message from Jesse Owens’ wife, the sort of pressure that has only been known by the tiniest number of other athletes, and then the races and the records.
It is why we are talking, to recall one of the greatest Olympic campaigns of all.
But before that he goes to the schedule and those golden Nike shoes. ‘It was a bit risky,’ he says.
‘I had to appeal to the Olympic Committee to change the schedule to make the 200/400 double possible to allow me to do something that had never been done before. After that you have got to deliver on it because let’s face it, I have gone there with gold shoes.
‘Had I got a silver or bronze, I would have had to stand there on the podium with those gold shoes. I’m glad it worked out.’
Johnson donned some bling gold shoes for the defence of his Olympic glory for Sydney 2000
It did. It had to. Johnson was the face of those Games. He was the home performer and their great hope, but he was also a guy who came loaded with the narrative of the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, where he had rocked up as the 400m world champion.
With one slice of bad ham he fell so ill he did not even make the final, but by Atlanta, as a two-time world gold medallist in the 400, and in his prime at 28, he was suffocated by blanket coverage. Perhaps only Usain Bolt, Cathy Freeman and Jessica Ennis-Hill have had anything like it.
‘The entire three weeks of the Olympics I was either at the track or in my hotel room because of the scrutiny,’ he recalls. ‘I actually flew into Atlanta from my training site in Dallas for the opening ceremony and then flew back until two days before my first race so I could be out of that environment.’
Anyone who watched Johnson as an athlete or a pundit across the subsequent two decades would not mistake him for someone prone to self-doubt. At that time, he remembers riding such attention in a state of absolute certainty that he would deliver on the expectations.
‘It wasn’t this goofy kind of confidence that comes out of thin air,’ he says. ‘The reason I never doubted I was going to win was because I felt if I could just step back and look at it like a pundit, I would say, “If all the competitors have their best race, I think Michael is going to win”. It was my honest belief.’
He came into the Games as such a heavy favourite for the 400m that Roger Black, his friend and rival from Britain, famously said the rest of the field were ‘racing for second’.
Johnson came into the 1996 games as the home favourite and under an immense pressure
The question was whether Johnson could win the 200m for a historic double, but that mystery lessened significantly at the US trials a month before the Olympics when he set a world record of 19.66sec in the same stadium. It was where he bumped into Owens’ widow, Ruth.
‘She was there in the stadium watching me run the 200m at the trials,’ he says. ‘She sent me a letter right before the Games, saying, “I sat there watching you run and you reminded me of how Jesse ran”, and that was huge for me. To this day it is still the
