Johnson raring to go at more records

“I still think 42 seconds is possible,” Johnson, who lowered Butch Reynolds’s 400 metres record to 43.18 seconds at last year’s world championships in Seville, added.

“And I don’t think it’s that difficult to do.

“I won’t be disappointed if I don’t break it again,” he said, then reconsidered: “but to a degree, I will be a little disappointed if I don’t.”

Johnson, who opened his South African tour last week with the fourth-fastest 200 metres ever of 19.71, also predicted he would sprint even faster in his run-up to the Sydney Olympics.

He said times of 19.4 and 19.5 appeared well within his range.

As to whether he might even approach his 200 metres world record of 19.32 seconds again some day, the Texan replied: “I think I can run faster than 19.32. It’s not out of the question, it’s not impossible.”

But the motivation, he admitted, was to lower his 400 metres record “way down where nobody has ever thought about going.”

“I feel like right now I’m basically picking up where I left off in 1996,” said Johnson, who twice broke the world record in the 200 metres that year, once at the Atlantic Olympics in which he won both 200 and 400 metres.

“I want to do that again and be healthy enough to run the relay.”

He said he was not concerned about peaking too early and not being ready for Sydney in September.

“There should be no problem,” Johnson said. “If I was running this kind of stuff indoors nobody would be saying anything about me peaking too early.”

After a scheduled 400 metres in Cape Town on Friday Johnson will return to Texas to prepare for his three-gold assault in Sydney. He has no major competitions lined up in April or May, giving him plenty of time to train.

He said his European schedule would be “extremely selective” but offered no details.

He ran the 300 metres for a very simple reason, he said: “as the world record holder in the 200 metres and the 400 metres it didn’t seem right that I didn’t have the record in the 300.”