ARLINGTON, Texas -- Tyson Gay's mother was hardly surprised to hear that her son had dinner in a restaurant. After all, Daisy Gay Lowe said, he eats nearly every meal outside the two-bedroom furnished apartment where he lives alone while training in this Dallas suburb.
It was what Gay ordered in a Cajun-style restaurant that startled his mother.
"He ate that?" she said, after hearing that the leading sprinter in the United States had tucked into a dish called Grilled Mahi Mahi St. Charles, with the fish embellished by lobster, shrimp, sauteed mushrooms and spinach in a Dijon cream sauce, accompanied by dirty rice.
"Oh, my God, that's awesome," Daisy Lowe said, struck by the idea that, at age 25, her son finally may have swallowed the nutritional advice she -- and others -- had been giving him for years.
This is a guy who usually traveled overseas to compete with one bag full of training clothes and another crammed with potato chips, cheese nips, doughnuts, fruit roll-ups, chocolate chip cookies, gummy fruit snacks, and, in one near concession to healthy eating, granola bars. A guy who saw asparagus stalks on a plate and asked if they were zucchini.
There was a guilelessness about that question, a refreshing lack of pretense in exposing how green he remains about vegetables, a world champion who is not the least bit world-weary.
It also reflects a mannerly upbringing, full of love and empty of affectation, in a deeply religious, Southern family (his mother's e-mail address expresses devotion to Christ). In one five-minute phone conversation last year, Gay addressed the caller as "sir" a half-dozen times.
Beyond the track, where Gay moves at a pace that made him reigning world champion in the 100 and 200 meters, he is a soft, polite drawl in a sprint world accustomed to a steady diet of stars who talk as loud and fast as they run.
What he does is the most fundamental and seemingly uncomplicated of sporting challenges: get from here to there faster than everyone, whether the older sister he finally beat at age 14 or the world-record holder he crushed for the 2007 world title in the 100.
He was slow only in coming to the realization that strictly fast food isn't the right fuel for a fast man, a man favored to win both sprints at the 2008 U.S. Olympic trials that begin Friday in Eugene, Ore., a man whose running should earn him more than $2 million this year from his shoe contract and other endorsements -- including one for McDonald's Southern-style chicken sandwich.
