Unfolding Toward Victory

To students of form in the 100-yd. dash, Sprinter Steven Williams comes on in races with all the grace of a commuter chasing the morning train. While his competitors jackrabbit away from the starting blocks, Williams usually lags behind, frantically trying to rev up the spidery legs on his 6-ft. 3-in. frame. Instead of pounding machine-like down the track, he jitterbugs unevenly, his shoulders performing a dance of their own. "One must understand track," marvels Fellow Sprinter Herb Washington, "to understand how one can make as many mistakes as Steve Williams and yet win."

But win he does. Once he has "unfolded," as the lanky San Diego State junior describes his getaway activity, he seems to accelerate with the speed of a race car suddenly shifted into high gear. At the A.A.U. relays last May in Fresno, Calif., Williams tied the world record (9.1 sec.) in the 100-yd. dash; five weeks later, in Bakersfield, he became the first runner in 13 years to win both the 100 and the 220 in an A.A.U. championship. Last week in Turin, Italy, he swept past the best of Italian competitors to a first-place finish in the 200-meter race.

A poised, articulate 19-year-old, Williams is rapidly emerging as the man most likely to restore the U.S. to international dominance in the sprints. This week he faces the man to beat in that department. At a Soviet-American meet in Minsk, Williams runs against Russian Valery Borzov, who captured the gold medal in the 100-meter sprint at the Munich Olympics last year and thus won recognition as "the world's fastest human."

Williams himself had been considered a strong contender for the honor until just shortly before those Olympics. In a May 1972 track meet in El Paso, however, he pulled a hamstring muscle and was unable to compete in the upcoming Olympic trials. "They were too soon for my leg to heal, which is why I didn't make the Olympic team," he says. "That was my worst upset. A big, big disappointment."

Rare Versatility. The son of a Bronx postal worker, Williams got some early training as a sprinter on New York City streets. "We used to have a thing on my block where all the kids would try to catch the ice-cream truck as it was driving away and open the back door," Williams recalls. "I was usually the first one there." In high school he concentrated on the quarter-mile event, running sprints only occasionally. He began to shift that emphasis when, in only his third competitive 100-yd. dash, he equaled a New York State high school record.

Williams adopted Tommie Smith, another long-legged, long-striding master of the 100-and 200-meter events, as his idol. "He had a distinctive high knee style," Williams explains, "and I worked on developing a knee lift. If I ran to catch a bus, I ran high knee lifts. That was all Tommie Smith's influence."

Displaying rare versatility for a sprinter, Williams still runs the quarter mile regularly. In fact, last year he set a world record (45.2 sec.) in the event for runners under 20 years of age. But in his present specialty, the early concentration on a longer-distance race has proved something of a handicap. "When I was known as a quarter miler," he says, "I just didn't have the motivation to train for a blazing start." For the moment, he is not doing much to correct the problem. "The middle of the season," he says, "is a crazy time to start changing what you've been having success with." Jim Bush, coach of the A.A.U. team bound for Minsk, adds: "He's young, and he still has to put it all together. But I really feel that Williams may be the first man to run the 100-yd. dash in nine seconds flat." If Williams succeeds in opening that door, it will be an ice-cream day indeed.

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