Track And Field

Caster Semenya started to run almost as soon as she could walk. She played soccer with the boys in her rural village. At school races, she'd lap the other girls -- sometimes twice or more. Even then, according to friends quoted by South African news reports, girls teased her about looking like a boy. Semenya shrugged it off and kept on running. But after she exploded onto the athletic stage Wednesday in the World Championships in Berlin, beating her nearest rival in the women's 800-meter race by a whopping 2.45 seconds, the question was back: Is she really a she?

He never ran a race he didn't think he could win, and Maurice Greene competed against time and age as valiantly as he could. His spirit was willing. But his muscles and tendons, taxed by years of propelling him out of the starting blocks and driving him faster than almost any human has run, would carry him no more.

When sophomore track standout D.J. Morgan of Woodland Hills Taft was 5, he tried to leap over a thorn bush in the frontyard of his parents' house in Pacoima while his older brothers watched in amusement. Morgan ended up landing on top of the bush, cutting his legs. As he cried, his brothers laughed. "That just made me jump higher and learn to get over it," he said. "Now, falling over hurdles is nothing compared to that because I remember the stinging sensation in my legs."

CHICAGO -- A round of applause, please, for sprinter Allyson Felix of Los Angeles and decathlete Bryan Clay of Glendora. Better still, give these Athens Olympic silver medalists a standing ovation for living their convictions. In the last and most uplifting moment of the U.S. Olympic media summit, Felix and Clay said they have been undergoing an extraordinary number of voluntary drug tests each week as part of Project Believe, a U.S.

Call it the "Incredible Shrinking Track." In a blunder of major proportions, a new track at Contreras High in downtown Los Angeles measures out at 390 meters -- 10 meters short of its designed length. Runners who thought their 400-meter times were real impressive will have to take a second look. "Surprising wasn't the word," Athletic Director Rose Low said when asked about her reaction to the flaw. "I almost passed out."

His times are impressive, but Randall Carroll's timing is even better. He's hitting his stride, well, just in time for the CIF state track and field championships this weekend at Cerritos College. Carroll, a junior at Los Angeles Cathedral who has committed to play football at USC, lowered his state-leading time in the 100 meters last weekend at the Southern Section Masters meet, speeding down the track in a wind-legal 10.47 seconds.

In a blink of an eye, the long-standing dynamic of track and field's glamour event at the upcoming Olympics has changed. Since last September, the 100 meters at the 2008 Beijing Olympics shaped up as a classic mano a mano -- Asafa Powell of Jamaica against Tyson Gay of the United States. That story had enough subtexts to be intriguing in its complexity.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Justin Gatlin, the defending Olympic 100-meter champion, lost his appeal Thursday to run in the U.S. Olympic track trials and said he would not take the case to the Supreme Court, meaning there are no more back doors or last-second maneuvers that could land him in China in six weeks. But he will continue to seek monetary and other damages from the U.S. Olympic Committee, the U.S.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Two weeks ago, Muna Lee said, she was in a truck in College Station, Texas, when it hit another vehicle that had run a red light. When Lee got out of the truck, the first thing she did was walk up a hill to make sure her legs were all right. The crash left her with a totaled truck but little damage to her body, other than a bruised shoulder that hurt when the willowy Lee lifted weights.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Please, let them be clean. Please, let there not be any nasty surprises in the coming weeks involving positive tests for steroids or other performance-enhancing chemicals with unpronounceable names. Let it be hard work, talent and gusts of hot summer wind that carried Tyson Gay to a spectacular, fastest-ever-recorded-under-any-conditions time of 9.68 seconds in the 100-meter dash Sunday at Hayward Field in the marquee event of the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.