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Kim Collins
Posted Mon, 02 Aug 2004

World and Commonwealth 100 metres king Kim Collins is not your archetypal sprint champion — he is distinctly modest, and will likely remain so should he add the Olympic title to his collection in Athens.

While reigning Olympic champion Maurice Greene sports a tattoo with the acronym 'GOAT', or 'Greatest of All Time', Collins says he is the best-known product of the tiny Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis — apart from a man doing time in an American prison for murder.

Greene has returned to a semblance of the form that at one point yielded three world 100 metre titles, the world record and the Sydney Olympics crown, and with it has come the old bravura, namely in backhanded compliments to his major rival.

"Kim Collins ran the race of the year, he won the (2003) world title in 10.07... I never believed that anyone would win a major title with that sort of time!" grinned Greene, who failed to defend his title as he crashed out in the semifinals in Paris.

Collins, though, came back with the perfect riposte.

"In the days when Linford Christie (Britain's 1992 Olympic champion) was running, nobody ran under 10 seconds before major championships. Now it's normal times for normal people," he said after destroying a good field at a meet in Birmingham, England.

Collins, 28, has been ever thus as he showed the day after winning the world title at the Stade de France in front of more people than live on his islands.

"I don't get ahead of myself.

"I don't think that people should brag about it," said Collins who was one of 11 children of which two are deceased.

Collins has been motivated from the start of his career not for personal aggrandizement or for the chance of grandstanding but because he wanted to provide security for his family, particularly his mother, and for another personal reason.

"I am negative by nature and when I used to see vagrants sleeping on the streets I said to myself I must never go that way."

However it is his mother that the father of two — a boy and a girl — who provides the focus of his life when he is back home.

"I've told her you've done your part in life just stay at home.

"She cuffed me for that but I was not deterred and I told her again to stay home and relax," he said.

Collins stands out from much of the rest of the pack because of the openness in which he approaches life and especially the dominant topic of the moment in the sport — doping.

"We can't control what people do," he said.

"We are people — we cheat in everything we do. We cheat in taxes, in tests, in relationships. We always feel we could never get caught in what we do, so we cheat.

"Eventually you get caught, but if you don't you end up in other problems within yourself. That is the price to pay."

He may be a modest man with modest times, but the time will not matter should he stand on the top step of the podium at the Olympic ceremony.

AFP