Once Again, Gay Falters In the Men's 200 Meters

'I've Had a Little Bad Luck,' He Says After Leg Cramp

EUGENE, Ore., July 5 -- Sprint superstar Tyson Gay hobbled out the door of the Bowerman Building, limped down some steps and slid gingerly onto the back of the electric cart waiting to take him to his hotel.

This was the slowest Gay had moved all week, yet many fans lining the avenue behind Hayward Field erupted in cheers. He had, after all, made it to the cart without assistance.

Gay's shocking collapse in the quarterfinal round of the 200 meters Saturday at the U.S. Olympic trials in track and field meant he won't compete in that event at the Beijing Olympics, a sour development for Gay, the U.S. track and field team and the U.S. Olympic Committee. His absence probably will stoke fresh debate about the appropriateness of an Olympic selection process that allows for no exceptions.

But Gay said he was all right, that what at first appeared to be a severe injury to his left hamstring was only a "bad cramp."

And he nodded in assent when asked if he expected to resume his pursuit of Olympic gold medals in the 100 and in two relays.

"I'm real disappointed," Gay said as he was driven off the premises, accompanied by two security guards and cheered by the throngs that followed him until gates were closed behind the cart. "It's strange, the same thing happened in '04 when I was in a similar lane. I'm just disappointed. I've had a little bad luck."

Gay also pulled up lame in the finals of the 200 at the 2004 Olympic trials in Sacramento.

On Saturday, shortly after the gun went off in his heat, Gay appeared to stumble, then he leaped and lurched abruptly. He dropped to the track in the middle of the first turn.

"I saw him pull [up], and something flew my way," said Damein White, who ran next to Gay's Lane 7 in Lane 6. "A shoe? I don't know. I just saw something white."

It was apparently Gay's race number that flew off. As the runners stormed to the finish, Gay sat writhing and crying, clutching his hamstring, until he was carried off the track on a wheeled stretcher and ushered into a room in the Bowerman Building.

"When I saw him in trouble, I thought he was going to catch himself," said Xavier Carter, who ran in the next heat, "but he didn't get back up."

The injury that felled Gay was the second to knock out a world champion Saturday. Lake Braddock High's Allen Johnson, trying to make his fourth Olympic team at age 37, stepped off the track after the fourth hurdle in the first heat of the 110 hurdles. He walked to the finish line, his Olympic dreams obliterated.