Some of track and field's most anxiously awaited matchups - Carl Lewis vs. Mike Powell, Dan O'Brien vs. Dave Johnson, Lewis vs. Leroy Burrell and Lewis vs. Michael Johnson - finally will come to fruition during the U.S. Olympic trials beginning Friday.
The 10-day trials, which will determine the U.S. team for the Barcelona Games July 25-Aug. 9, will be held at refurbished 29,000-seat Tad Gormley Stadium in City Park. It will be the first major track and field meet at New Orleans since the 1960s.The first three finishers in each event will qualify for the team, with the men expected to have one of its strongest lineups ever.
The key figure is the multi-talented Lewis, winner of four Olympic gold medals in 1984, matching the feat of Hall of Famer Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games, and winner of two golds at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Lewis plans to compete in three events at the trials - the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, and the long jump. If he qualifies for the team in any of the three, he also would be eligible for the 400-meter relay team. Qualifying in all three would give him another opportunity to duplicate his remarkable 1984 accomplishments, and become the winningest gold medalist in Olympic track and field history.
The all-time leader with nine golds is Paavo Nurmi, the great Finnish distance runner. The American leader with eight golds is jumper Ray Ewry.
The Lewis-Powell confrontation in the long jump will be their first since Powell ended Lewis' 10-year, 65-meet winning streak at last year's World Championships in Tokyo by leaping a world-record 29 feet, 41/2 inches. Lewis had the first three 29-foot jumps of his career during the competition and the best series of any long jumper ever, but had to settle for second place with a wind-aided 29-23/4.
In the 100, Lewis, who set the world record of 9.86 seconds at the World Championships, will be facing Burrell, the former world record-holder who finished second at Tokyo in 9.88, for the first time since that meet. They rarely run against each other in competition because they are training partners in Houston.
Lewis, co-holder of the U.S. record in the 200, and Johnson, the 1991 world champion, never have raced against each other.
The decathlon duel between O'Brien, the American record-holder and 1991 world champion, and Johnson, this season's world leader, has been simmering since early in the year when Reebok began a torrid commercial campaign featuring the two athletes, asking who's the world's greatest athlete: Dan or Dave?
There will be several other eagerly awaited matchups.
- The men's 400 will include the 1-3 finishers at the 1988 Games, Steve Lewis and Danny Everett, plus Michael Johnson, ranked No. 1 in the world last year, and Quincy Watts, the fastest in the world this year. Butch Reynolds, the world record-holder and 1988 Olympic silver medalist, has vowed to compete even though he is on suspension by the International Amateur Athletic Federation and ineligible for the Olympics. The IAAF has said that if Reynolds runs, anyone competing against him would be suspended and the U.S. might not have any 400 runners at the Games.
- The men's 110-meter hurdles would be an outstanding event if all the top competitors were healthy. But two-time Olympic champion and world record-holder Roger Kingdom and former world record-holder Renaldo Nehemiah are recovering from injuries. In addition, three-time world champion Greg Foster has not been run to par this season.
- The men's high jump will match Hollis Conway, the 1991 world indoor champion and American indoor record-holder, against Charles Austin, the 1991 world champion and American outdoor record-holder.
- The women's 1,500 meters will be a showdown among Mary Slaney, the national record-holder; PattiSue Plumer, who ran her lifetime best last month, and Suzy Hamilton, the 1991 U.S. champion. Slaney and Plumer also could meet in the 3,000.