Athletics: Fredericks asserts his class to new generation

Spectators at last month's meeting in Sheffield were privileged to witness a sight that two years ago appeared lost to athletics – Frankie Fredericks in full flight.

Savage Achilles tendon injuries requiring two operations in the last two years left the career of Namibia's quadruple Olympic silver medallist in the balance. But he has returned, big time, and is ready to offer the world further evidence of his continuing quality at the Commonwealth Games which open in Manchester on Thursday.

The way in which the 34-year-old African dealt with the challenge of Dwain Chambers over 200 metres at the Don Valley stadium was sufficient to provoke memories of his past glories in Barcelona, Stuttgart, Victoria and Atlanta.

Fredericks is one of the smoothest technicians you will ever see. He is to athletics what Justine Henin is to women's tennis, someone whose style delights in itself, as well as proving hugely effective.

Gold medals from the 1993 World Championships and 1994 Commonwealth Games, as well as the two silver mementos from each of the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, attest to that for Fredericks. But, after spending huge amounts of time and money on treatment to recover his previous fitness levels at an age when many sprinters are thinking of packing up, he wants more.

"Some people have to win," Fredericks once said. "I don't have to win, I want to win."

In his case, the insane single-mindedness of your average world-beating athlete is tempered by a sensitivity and humility that manages to acknowledge the wider world beyond a 400m track.

It is an attitude that was encouraged during an upbringing in a country which, until its independence in 1990, was under the sway of neighbouring apartheid South Africa.

His mother, Riekie Fredericks, brought him up singlehandedly in the black township of Katatura, near Namibia's capital city of Windhoek, following the break-up of her marriage. She worked as a seamstress for a white family in Windhoek and took on two other part-time jobs in order to be able to afford what passed as luxuries, one of which was having an indoor toilet built in their four-room house.

Academic aptitude enabled the young Fredericks to win high school places, and then a position as trainee manager with the local Rossing Uranium Mine, for whom he still does work. They helped fund him through a four-year computer science degree at Brigham Young University in Utah, where he travelled on an athletics scholarship.

Feted back in his home country, Fredericks has now set up a Foundation to assist young people and he has no problem with the fact that he will be paying his own way in Manchester, just as he did in the previous Commonwealth Games at Kuala Lumpur and Victoria.

"If my country has bigger priorities to attend to, then paying for my travel and accommodation isn't a big deal," he said in Sheffield. "I understand the sacrifices that have been made to make my country free and to free its people."

Fredericks is a class act as a person, and a sportsman. The most severe test of his latter aptitude came at the 1996 Olympics, where he ran the 200m in the stupendous time of 19.68sec, only to see the gold go to the home runner Michael Johnson in a world record of 19.32. It was a shattering turn of events but in the aftermath Fredericks, despite being subdued, was never less than gracious.

That said, the man who has lost Olympic gold by one place four times can hardly be classified as a habitual loser. Even at his high school his impatience with the attitude of his fellow players – "We would lose 4-0 and my team-mates would be laughing" – caused him to give up a hugely-promising footballing career for the track. "He could already outrun any defender on the field, and he was a very bad loser, which is why team sports were not best for him," said Daniel Tjongarero, a family friend.

This year Fredericks's ambitions have been fuelled by the disappointments he has suffered in recent seasons. He described having to pull out of the Sydney Olympics with Achilles tendon problems as one of the most difficult decision he ever had to make. "I thought this would be my time to win the gold," he said back in September 2000. "But I am not here to make up the numbers. I would have been here to win."

There is no doubt his philosophy in Manchester will be the same. Fredericks leads the 2002 100m Commonwealth rankings with the 9.94sec he produced in Windhoek in April, a month before recording a wind-assisted 9.85 in Nairobi. Over 200m he leads the way too with a 20.07 clocked up in Lille, the fastest time recorded at sea-level this year.

As he stood in the Don Valley Stadium last month, staring out at the spiral staircase which led to the spectator galleries, he pondered on the question of how best his talents might be employed in the City of Manchester Stadium this week.

"I've got a Commonwealth 200m gold medal already," he said. "I don't have a 100m gold, so it might be best to try for that one. But maybe it will be easier in the 200. In the 100m if I have a bad start it could be over. In the 200m I have lots of experience and confidence. I know that if I want to do it I can. I really don't know what I'm going to do.

"I'll have to sit down and look at the schedule and see if I can do both. I just hope that I can stay healthy so I can race these young guys in Manchester. The Commonwealth Games is important to me. It's a major competition.

"The last two years have been horrible. I've had two operations on my Achilles, which ruptured twice, and I've spent a lot of money on my rehabilitation. Now I just want to make sure that everything I spent was not for nothing."

Mr Lewis-Francis. Mr Chambers. Mr Campbell. Mr Devonish. Mr Malcolm. You have been warned.