Collins,
an ice cool cocktail of sprinting talent
Matthew
Brown for the IAAF
28 July 2002 - There was a moment before the start of the men’s 100m final on
Saturday at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester that said a lot about the Kim
Collins’ approach to life.
As the starter prepared to call the athletes to their blocks, the crowd noise rose to a feverous pitch. Collins was sandwiched between the two English favourites. To his left a fierce looking Dwain Chambers glared down the track. To Collins' right, the powerful teenager Mark Lewis-Francis pursed his lips nervously. But Collins simply raised his smiling face to the crowd.
“Shush,” he gestured, holding his fingers to his lips. “I know you’re excited but we’ve got this thing to do,” he seemed to be saying. “You can shout when the gun’s gone.”
The noise abated and Collins, still smiling, settled into his blocks. A fraction under 10 seconds later the calmest man in the stadium had the gold medal in the bag and a new national record to his name (9.98). While his two young English rivals' bodies had cracked under the pressure, an untroubled Collins had simply glided to the line.
“It’s very important to keep calm, not just on the track but off it too,” the laid back Caribbean sprinter said later. “It’s important to stay relaxed in life. If you panic when you’re facing a challenge how can you deal with it?”
It’s a lesson someone should pass on to Messieurs Chambers and Lewis-Francis.
While all sprinters have their own way of preparing for a race, of psyching themselves up, Collins maintains his natural relaxed manner because . . . we’ll, that’s just the way he is. “He is one of the most pleasant, happy individuals that I have ever been around,” comments Monte Stratton, his head coach at Texas Christian University in the USA, where the 26 year-old studies psychology. “Most sprinters are high strung and moody. He’s none of those. He is the most happy, calm guy you would ever meet. And he is a super athlete.”
Stratton recruited Collins from Arizona Community College after hearing about his talent from a contact in Jamaica. Collins had competed at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when St Kitts and Nevis made its first ever appearance at a Games. Aged 20, he made it to the quarter finals but soon disappeared, attracting hardly a mention, along with all those other seemingly obscure athletes who make up the minor places in the early rounds of international championships. He did the same at the world championships in 1997, and again in ‘99.
However, that year he also finished second at the Central American and Caribbean championships in Bridgetown, Barbados, recording 10.31, and people began to take notice. The improvements he’s made since then, particularly to his start, are largely down to Stratton, he says. In 2000, Collins again qualified for the Olympics, making up one of the two-strong team from St Kitts and Nevis in Sydney. This time however, he emerged from obscurity to become the first man ever from his country to compete in a final, finishing seventh in the 100m in 10.17.
Suddenly the best sprinters in the world were wondering who this new man was. “It was an unbelievable experience,” says Collins of his time in Sydney. “You have 200 countries, and you are from a country that nobody has even heard about.”
Not surprisingly, his achievement didn’t go unnoticed back at home, either. In fact, the St Kitts and Nevis government was so delighted that he had become “the seventh fastest man in the world” that it awarded Collins a brand new three-bedroom house, and a local company donated furniture, a fridge and cooker worth more than $20,000 East Caribbean dollars.
Collins’ progress through the sprinting ranks continued last year when he finished sixth in the 100m in Edmonton and then shared bronze in the 200m with Shawn Crawford of the USA. Initially, Collins was given fourth after a blanket finish in which just 0.047 seconds separated second to seventh places. But after an agonising wait, when multiple, inconclusive replays were displayed on the stadium screen, Collins and Crawford were awarded joint third place and the same time, 20.20, as the silver medallist, Jamaica’s Chris Williams.
Not merely the first world championships medallist from his country, but the first from the eastern Caribbean, Collins clearly regards his role as representative of the region as an important one. “I have to take up where Ato Boldon and Obadele Thompson have left off,” he says. “I feel, not a burden, but pride at representing the English-speaking Caribbean.”
Collins comes from St Kitts, the bigger of the two volcanic islands that make up his nation, where 27,000 of the country’s 39,000 people live. Located in the northern part of the Leeward Islands, they sound like the ideal nurturing ground for a man who, off track, clearly prefers a slower pace of life. “It’s a place where you don’t have to have a car to have fun,” says Collins. “You can walk everywhere, and you can always walk to the beach. When I am home I can play my music really loud. It’s kicked back to the extreme.”
Before Collins, St Kitts’s sporting pedigree has come through cricket (a number of its countrymen have played for the West Indies) but he hopes that his exploits on the track will inspire others to take up athletics. “It’s difficult because the island is very small and most people don’t have an opportunity to use expensive facilities,” he says. “But I would love to explain to young athletes that it is possible, no matter how small your country is, to make it to the highest level. I first got serious about track in high school but I never thought I would get this far. It’s a big surprise to me.”
It was a surprise to some people that Collins even entered the 100m in Manchester, for he had suggested he would run only the 200m, after a long season in which he’d already lowered his national record to 10.04 and run a windy 9.98, both back in May. “I was trying to keep my head down, but there was a lot of pressure from my fans,” he says, referring again to the responsibility he feels to the people back home. “This was the first time my country had a chance to win at a major championships, so I had to run it for the fans.”
In doing so, he upset a lot of others, English ones, who’d been whipped by the hype into believing the gold medal was theirs. For them it was just a question of which Englishman would get there first. But Collins quietened the crowd, both before the race and at the end. “Of course the English fans wanted to hear that the gold medal was going to England,” he says. “Most of them hadn’t even heard of St Kitts. Unfortunately for them, I had a great day and spoiled the party.”
They’ll be relieved to see that he won’t be repeating his spoiling act in the 200m, for Collins withdrew from the longer sprint this morning. Not that it’s the last we’ll hear of him, for in Manchester the man from St Kitts definitely arrived on the scene, not with a blast but a glide and a smile. As Donovan Bailey put it: “He’s smooth, he’s as smooth as silk.”