Michael Johnson

Career 1991–1995 In 1991 at the World Championships in Tokyo, Johnson earned his first world title by winning the 200 m race by the unusual margin of victory of 0.33 seconds over Frankie Fredericks.

Two weeks before the 1992 Summer Olympics began, Johnson and his agent both contracted food poisoning at a restaurant in Spain. Johnson lost both weight and strength. He was the favorite to win the 200 m going into the Olympics, but he could do no better than sixth in his semifinal heat, and failed to reach the 200 m final by 0.16 seconds. Nevertheless, he was able to race as a member of the 4 × 400 m relay team, which won a gold medal and set a new world-record time of 2:55.74. Johnson ran his leg in a time of 44.73.

He won the 1993 U.S. title in the 400 m, and followed it with world titles in both the 400 m and 4 × 400 m relay. His 42.94 second split time in the 4 × 400 m relay remains the fastest 400 meters in history. With that performance he qualified to run at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and prepared to attempt to win both the 200 meters and 400 meters events, a feat never before achieved by a male athlete. while other sources state each shoe weighed about . The left shoe was a US size 10.5 while the right shoe was a US size 11, to account for Johnson's longer right foot.

After the 1996 season ended, Johnson received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in any sport in the United States, and was named ABC's Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year. In August, HarperCollins published his biographical/motivational book, Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great Feats.

Rivalry with Donovan Bailey

After the end of the 1996 Summer Olympics, American Sportscaster Bob Costas claimed that Johnson was faster than 100 m gold medalist Donovan Bailey because Johnson's 200 m time (19.32 Seconds) divided by 2 (9.66 Seconds) was shorter than Bailey's 100 m time (9.84). This started a debate on whether Johnson or Bailey was the real "World's Fastest Man", which in turn resulted in a 150 m race between the two, in which Bailey won after Johnson, already behind in the race, alleged to have injured his hamstring.

1997–1999 After recovering from the injury, Johnson was able to compete for his third 400 m world title. The IAAF invented a new policy of giving a "bye" to the defending champions essentially to allow Johnson to compete in the IAAF World Championships that year, because Johnson was unable to qualify the conventional method (by competing in the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships) due to his injury from the race with Bailey. More than a month after the U.S. Championships, Johnson had recovered from his injury and won the 400 meters at the 1997 World Championships in Athens.

At the 1998 Goodwill Games in New York City, Johnson anchored the U.S. 4 × 400 m relay team with Jerome Young, Antonio Pettigrew, and Tyree Washington to a win and set a world record of 2:54.20. Pettigrew has since admitted doping from 1997, while Young was caught doping in 1999.

Johnson was plagued by injury in 1999, and his following season was troubled with two injury scares that limited him to just four 400 m races before the 1999 World Championships in Seville. Were it not for the IAAF policy established two years earlier for Johnson, that allowed automatic entry to defending champions, he could not have raced in Seville since he failed to compete in the U.S. trials due to his injury. He recovered and won his fourth 400 meter world title with a new world-record time of 43.18 seconds at the relatively late age of 31 years and 11 months, which stood for 12 days short of 17 years before being beaten at the 2016 Olympics by the South African Wayde van Niekerk. Johnson's splits for this world record were 21.22 seconds for the opening 200 meters and 21.96 seconds for the closing 200 meters, giving a differential of 0.74 seconds.

2000 Sydney Olympics After qualifying for the 2000 Summer Olympics in the 400 m, Johnson sustained an injury in the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials for the 200 meters while racing in a highly anticipated matchup against the 100 m and 200 m world champion, Maurice Greene. The injury prevented a defense of his 200 m Olympic title. Johnson ended his career at the Sydney Olympics by winning the gold medal in the 400 m, which brought his total number of Olympic gold medals to four. By winning the 400 m at the age of 33 years 12 days, he earned the distinction of being the oldest Olympic gold medalist at any track event shorter than 5000 m. Johnson was also the anchor of the United States 4 × 400 relay team along with Alvin Harrison, Antonio Pettigrew, and Calvin Harrison, which originally won the gold medal, but was later stripped of the title after Pettigrew and Jerome Young (who ran in the heats) were found guilty of having used performance-enhancing drugs.

On July 18, 2004, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled that Jerome Young was ineligible to compete in Sydney and annulled all his past results, including those achieved as part of relay teams. Young had competed for the USA team in the heats and semi-final of this event. Therefore, the United States team was stripped of the gold medal and Nigeria, Jamaica, and the Bahamas were moved up one position each. On July 22, 2005, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned this decision and restored the original finish order of the race based on a ruling that a team should not be disqualified because of a doping offense by an athlete who did not compete in the finals. Then in June 2008, Antonio Pettigrew admitted to having used banned performance-enhancing substances, and agreed to return his gold medal. Johnson announced that he would return his own gold medal, won as part of the relay team with Pettigrew. Johnson stated that he felt "cheated, betrayed and let down" by what Pettigrew had done at the Games. Pettigrew died by suicide in 2010.

Achievements

Johnson has run 200 m in under 19.80 seconds six times, and he has run the distance in less than 20 seconds twenty-three times. He holds nine of the top 50 200 m performances of all time. Johnson has run twenty-two 400 m races in under 44 seconds; he holds twenty-two of the top 50 and four of the top ten 400 m performances of all time. The company works with Olympic teams and football clubs and has operations around the world. Michael Johnson Performance currently works with Arsenal, assisting in the development of young players in their academy.

In June 2008, Johnson voluntarily returned the 4 × 400 m relay gold medal he earned in the 2000 Olympics after Antonio Pettigrew, who ran the second leg, admitted he took performance-enhancing drugs between 1997 and 2001. Pettigrew made his admission while giving testimony in the trial of coach Trevor Graham for his role in the BALCO scandal. On August 2, 2008, the International Olympic Committee stripped the gold medal from the U.S. men's 4 × 400-meter relay team. Three of the four runners in the event final, including Pettigrew and twins Alvin and Calvin Harrison, and preliminary round runner Jerome Young, all have admitted or tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

In the summer of 2018, Johnson was co-captain and a coach for Godspeed, a flag football team made of former professional American football players that participated in the American Flag Football League (AFFL). The team were crowned the champions of participating pro teams but lost in the final match to the amateur champion team.

In September 2018, Johnson suffered a stroke that affected his left side. By November, he stated he was almost "back to normal", and attributed his successful recovery to the "Olympic mindset". In connection with his 54th birthday in 2021, he states that he has fully recovered.

In 2024, he launched a new Track and Field League, Grand Slam Track, ahead of the 2025 season start. In December 2025, Grand Slam Track confirmed they had filed for bankruptcy. Grand Slam Track has expressed its intention to return for a 2026 season once its financial obligations are resolved.

Broadcasting Since retiring from competitive track in 2001, Johnson has worked as a television pundit, often for the BBC in the United Kingdom, where he has also written columns for the Daily Telegraph and The Times newspapers.

Johnson first worked for the BBC at the World Championships in 2001. He subsequently was part of the BBC's presenting team at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, 2012 Olympic Games in London, 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, and 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. In addition, he has worked on the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast and 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Johnson has also worked for the BBC at the World Championships, but did not take part in the 2025 World Athletics Championships after deciding to focus on Grand Slam Track.

He was in the BBC commentary booth for the men's 400 meters final in Rio de Janeiro to see his world record broken by Wayde van Niekerk, saying about van Niekerk's performance, "Oh my God! From lane eight, a world record. He took it out so quick. I have never seen anything from 200 to 400 like that. That was a massacre from Wayde van Niekerk. He just put those guys away."

Appearances in media Johnson guest-starred in the 2002 film, The Master of Disguise, as one of the disguises Fabbrizio (James Brolin) takes on to borrow the U.S. Constitution, as part of a scheme by Devlin Bowman (Brent Spiner) to steal the world's greatest treasures. I

Johnson appeared as a contestant on NBC's 9th season of The Celebrity Apprentice (2010), placing 10th after exiting the show due to a personal issue on the fifth episode of the season first airing April 11, 2010.

As part of the build-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics, Johnson made a documentary, Survival of the Fastest, for Channel 4 which investigated the dominance of African-American and African-Caribbean sprinters. The program made the suggestion that a side effect of the slave trade may have been to accelerate natural selection as only the very fittest could survive the brutal process, resulting in a population predisposed to superior athletic performance.

Personal life As of 2008 Johnson lived in Marin County, California, with his second wife Armine Shamiryan (a chef), and his daughter Selendis Sebastian, born in 2000 during his first marriage to entertainment reporter Kerry D'Oyen.

Awards Associated Press Athlete of the Year: 1996 3× USOC SportsMan of the Year: 1993, 1995, 1996 James E. Sullivan Award: 1996 L'Équipe Champion of Champions: 1996 World Athletics Awards 2× World Athlete of the Year (Men): 1996, 1999 Track & Field News 2× World Athlete of the Year: 1990, 1996 6× U.S. Athlete of the Year: 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000