Sprint kingmaker

London He sits in the stands of Kingston's National Stadium during the annual athletics meeting he oversees, a bear of a man whose gaze never deviates from the sprinters pounding the track in front of him. "It's all in the eyes," observes one of his old friends, Paul Swaby, when you ask where the genius of Glen Mills lies.

In races when everyone else might be focused only on the winner, the world's most garlanded sprint coach could be espying potential in the teenager battling home down the field. Swaby remembers him doing just that after one particular high school race. Mills pointed at the gangling boy finishing third or fourth and said: "That's the one." That kid's name? Asafa Powell, a future 100 metre world record holder.

Coach Mills knows. Jamaica have annexed more than 100 world and Olympic sprinting medals under his stewardship and while this summer promises to be the most burnished of all, preparing for it could also represent the most difficult balancing act in sport. The reason can be found at the University of West Indies track in Kingston, where Mills oversees the world's two most extraordinary sprinters, Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, and attempts to keep both content as they prepare for a potentially career-defining meeting at London 2012. Mills is adamant it is possible.

‘I love both'

Try to prise from Mills which of the two he ultimately fancies to prevail at the Games over both distances and you get nothing, save the prediction: "They are capable of superlative performances on any given day." He is like a parent who would never dream of admitting to having a favourite child. The only difference between the pair? One's short and one's tall, he enjoys teasing. "Let me tell you something," he adds, in his baritone boom. "The hype and sensationalism surrounding them will affect me in no way. I love both athletes." And that is the key.

He does not compare or contrast the flamboyant showman Bolt with the studious, intense Blake, the youth cast as the apprentice; he loves both unconditionally.

What he does not love, however, is the feeling that certain elements are trying to sensationalise, over-analyse and ultimately undermine the Bolt-Blake dynamic. Even respected voices like Mills' old charge, the former world 100 metre champion Kim Collins, fancy that two stellar athletes training alongside each other is a recipe only for calamity because "two male crabs cannot live in the same hole".

All rubbish, says Mills. He has heard the theory that one world-beating athlete always has to benefit more than the other from such an arrangement — many still believe Colin Jackson would have won the Olympic 110 metre hurdles crown in 1992 if he hadn't started training alongside the eventual victor Mark McKoy — but stridently dismisses it. "It is being built up as if it is a hindrance and it really is not. I have no problem with them training together, Usain and Yohan have no problem with it. They are enjoying it. And I'm glad that they don't pay any mind to the press talk. In fact, it is pushing them closer together!

"My objective is to make them the greatest they can be within the potential they have. Blake is young, developing and is getting better every day; Usain has demonstrated his level before and they'll both be going out there to make a great spectacle for the world and enjoy the competition for the fun of it."

The whispers have been they are spending more time apart but Mills is adamant that is just because their training programmes are individually tailored and that Bolt's key preparations will, as usual, be in European meets while Blake prefers to be nearer home in the Americas.

"They know they're competing for the same marbles but they understand that rivalry in sport doesn't necessarily mean being enemies. Maurice Greene and Ato Boldon trained together and had great success. Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell and Joe DeLoach came from the same camp. So this is not new." Both Blake and Bolt rave about a "father figure, a friend and a mentor", the best coach in the world. "I am flattered when people say this but I don't mind if I'm in a room and nobody even notices I'm there," Mills says. "I don't mind being ignored." A likely story.

Nobody ignores Coach Mills here, and a certainty of Jamaican life is that one day he will arise as ‘Sir Glen', protector of the island's most treasured assets — its athletes. If you want to get near them, even the superstars' agents need the OK from the 62-year-old first. It is almost touching to see the absolute faith those athletes place in him. Talking to Blake at the Camperdown Classic, the meeting named after the school where the 16-year-old Mills began his love affair with coaching, the world 100 metres champion said he had no idea whether he was going to be allowed to attempt the 100 metre-200 metre double in London.

Total trust

Mills, he accepted, would let him know in his own time. Just as Bolt, who had broken the world 100 metre record earlier in 2008, only discovered in the fortnight before the Beijing Games that Mills was satisfied to let him run the blue riband 100 metres as well as his main event, the 200 metres. History tells us, of course, that the former maths teacher finally calculated that he was — and the rest was mind-blowing. You sense if Mills told them to do a little pirouette and then a bunny hop out of the blocks because it would be good for them, they wouldn't hesitate. The trust in his touch and vision is total.

Mills never competed himself. The only time he sprinted, he says, was to run away from "dangers". As he learned his coaching craft from Jamaica's great quarter-miler Herb McKenley, and took courses as far afield as Britain and Mexico, he never had time for marriage; he was wed to his sport. "I've been very devoted to this sport. I've had my admirers but marriage for me now at 62? Well, I'll finish my life in serving my God and coaching my athletes until I'm ready to retire."

Jamaica hopes those wise old eyes never stop seeing magic.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012