Gail Devers stared straight ahead, her eyes focused on the first hurdle. “I was trying to block it out,” she said later.She took her position in Lane 6 at Olympic Stadium Sunday night, placing her long fingernails, painted blue on this night, on the white line. As the gun sounded for the fifth heat of the preliminaries in the 100-meter hurdles, she strode forward but she couldn’t make the first hurdle before falling to the ground, clutching her left calf.As she sat before a hushed crowd, she began unwrapping the bandages from her leg. She tried to stand, took two steps, and had to sit back down before being helped off the track.“Tonight, I said I was going to be tougher than this. That’s why I ran,” she said.Devers has a history of being tough and overcoming the odds (including a two-year bout with Graves’ disease), so it was no surprise that she was here going for an elusive gold medal in her specialty, despite injuring her calf in Atlanta one week ago. She had kept the injury quiet, downplaying it when she ran in the 100-meter dash semi-finals a day before (she didn’t qualify) because that’s her style.“Everyone has their obstacles to overcome,” she said, “and this was mine to deal with.” The injury was the latest in a series of Olympic disappointments for Devers, on her fifth Olympic team just three months shy of her 38th birthday. In 1988, she was eliminated from the hurdles in the semi-finals but she was not yet the sport’s star. By the Barcelona Games, she was ranked first in the world and was leading for the gold when she hit the last hurdle to wind up fifth.In Atlanta, she missed a medal by one-100th of a second. In Sydney, she looked strong, running the fastest time of the meet (12.62 seconds) in the opening round. But in the semifinal, she stopped running halfway through with an injured hamstring.But while Devers never won her best event — she was a three-time world champion in the hurdles and was second twice — her trips to the Olympics had their moments, too. In Barcelona, she won the 100 in a photo finish over Julie Cuthbert of Jamaica, and repeated that title in Atlanta with a photo-finish win over Merlene Ottey, when both were timed in 10.94 seconds.She came to Athens, again entered in the 100 (she was fourth at the US trials) because Torri Edwards had been banned for illegal drugs. Devers wasn’t herself in the 100. She had only the 16th-best time in the first round to barely qualify for the semi-finals, then failed to advance to the final Saturday.When she came to the warmup track adjacent to the Olympic Stadium Sunday, she said the calf “felt tighter than I wanted” but she gave it a try anyway. During her warmups in the stadium, she heard a “pop” as she went over the first hurdle. “I can say I had a great run at all my Olympics,” Devers said. “The lesson I learned is you have to be tough. If you set a goal for yourself and keep the dream alive, nobody can stop you. It doesn’t mean you have to be No. 1. That’s what excellence is. That doesn’t mean you have to get what other people think is excellence. That’s the gold medal that everybody says has eluded me. “I’m nowhere near being a failure. I believe I conquered them tonight just getting out there and trying when I already knew it was gone. My career is not over. I’m here, I’m alive. I’m not healthy but I’m alive. I’ve been blessed.”(The New York Times)
