Olympic Champ Jeremy Wariner Splits From Coach

I suppose stranger things have happened in an Olympic year than a reigning champion firing his coach of five years eight months before the athlete is set to defend his title, but right now my mind is challenged to find anything to compare to American 400m sprinter Jeremy Wariner's latest career move.

Wariner participates in track and field. But let's not beat around the bush here.

To say that he merely participates is akin to saying Tiger Woods plays golf or that Michael Jordan dribbled a basketball.

Wariner, a double-gold medalist in Athens four years ago and four-time world champion, earns his living running one-lap races around a track in a sport governed by intricately-woven timings—and he did so with a coach who'd been in the sport well over 40 years.

An athlete like Wariner times his interval training, his race starts, his race splits, and even his lean at the finish line. He even has to time how long it will take him following races of note to conduct interviews before he's ushered off for drug testing (60 minutes, to be exact).

Apparently, however, Wariner missed the lesson at Baylor University on the art of timing an exit from a highly successful programme—and now, from the coach behind that programme's success.

But then again, Wariner left a Hart-based programme once before, in 2004, when, following his second gold medal in Athens, he turned professional and was forced to forego his two remaining years of NCAA competition.

What Wariner does with his career is his business - in every literal sense of the word. Jeremy Wariner runs, Jeremy Wariner gets paid. His shoe sponsor, adidas, pours in the big bucks and his agent, Michael Johnson—the 200m and 400m world-record holder who brokers such deals for his prótegé—gets a cut.

And so did Hart. Until Tuesday.

Hart, who coached Johnson to two world records (19.32 over 200m and 43.18 over 400m) during Johnson's long and successful career as an athlete, was asked recently by Wariner's legal camp to review revisions to his contract—one which had previously been renewed on a yearly basis.

Hart, who had been operating on a one-year contract as Wariner's personal coach each year for the past five years that called for him to receive a percentage of Wariner’s earnings, received a contract proposal that reduced that percentage—a proposal which Hart stated he simply could not accept.

“It was a significant cutback, and I didn’t think I could do it. Well, actually, I knew I couldn’t do it.”

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