? Bershawn Jackson mocks Welshman's world title time
? London 2012 gold is what matters now, says 400m hurdler
Whoever arranged the press conferences before Thursday's Diamond League meeting has a mischievous sense of humour. Dai Greene was put up alongside Bershawn Jackson, the United States hurdler who had recently said the Welsh world champion had been "writing cheques that his body can't cash".
The International Association of Athletics Federations did not take a lead from David Haye's press conference with Dereck Chisora and separate the two men with a metal fence but they did sit a pole vaulter and a steeplechaser between them on the top table. The two human buffers spent most of the 20 minutes swapping perplexed looks while Greene and Jackson exchanged platitudinous pleasantries about one another. Now they were face to face their appetite for trash-talk seemed sated.
Jackson is nicknamed Batman ? "because I have big ears and I fly when I run" ? so Greene has come to be known as The Riddler by his own training group, while their coach, Malcolm Arnold, has become the Penguin. Greene's nickname does,not quite fit. He is a straight-talker, as blunt as a pair of plastic scissors. "Whether he wants to speak to me or not it doesn't really bother me," he said of Jackson. "I don't come here to make friends."
Greene was at pains to point out that he would never be so stupid as to call his US rivals in the 400m hurdles "overrated", which is what some reported. But otherwise he was unrepentant. "I guess it doesn't bother me if people find me nice or not nice. I'm always courteous to them." Both Jackson and Angelo Taylor have said that Greene's winning time in Daegu of 48.26sec was so slow that he was lucky to get the gold with it. Greene swatted that jibe away as well. "If I hadn't have won, it would have been even slower. That's the way I see it."
At the same time Greene must know there is a germ of truth in what they say. The chances are he will need to go a lot faster to win the Olympic title and he and Arnold have tailored his training programme to help him do that. "I opened up last year with a 48.2sec and I didn't really get any faster. I don't want that to happen this year. So I'm a little bit slower than I was at the same time in 2011, but hopefully I'll be able to build on it. The way my training has been scheduled I should improve, should get faster." That should lead, he reckons, "to a greater peak at the start of August, when I need to be at my best."
That strategy means he may not win here in Rome, or in his other pre-Olympic races. But Greene is happy to give up the bragging rights to the likes of Jackson if he has to. It is a different approach from 2011, when he felt he needed to impose himself on the event early in the season, so that he could get inside the other runners' heads.
He seems to be doing that already this year and he has not even won a major race yet. "They know who I am already. I know if I don't win in Rome, people will say, 'Why hasn't he won, he's the world champion', but for me that doesn't really matter. Everyone will remember what happens in London."
"No one can tell you who won this race last year," Greene says. "When you imagine yourself training in the winter, you don't think, 'Oh, I can't wait to win in Rome or wherever.' You think, 'I want to win in London at the Olympics.' That's your main aim. Everything else is just a stepping stone on the way."
Jackson has told Greene that he has "a target on his back" and, given that he has been handed a special black-and-gold kit to run in now he is the world No1, there is a kind of truth in that. He has brought the kit with him to Rome but has he packed his chequebook alongside it? "We'll see whether that materialises in London," he says with a chuckle.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/may/30/dai-green-london-2012-games
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