LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

By Jonathan McEvoy

PUBLISHED: 15:38 EST, 21 June 2012 | UPDATED: 15:46 EST, 21 June 2012

Hope and fear: Teenager Adam Gemili

The diehards will come in their cagoules and thermals to behold the fastest man in Britain.

There will only be a smattering of them — 5,000 spectators at the most optimistic prediction — inside  Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium for the first of three days of the Aviva Olympic trials.

But, still, that fastest man, the London-born teenager of Moroccan-Iranian descent, will travel, like all the other 800 competitors, in heightened hope and fear. That is because the tension in the cold and wet air forecast for the Midlands this weekend has blown in from London’s Olympic Park like a gale.

Adam Gemili’s critical figures are 10.08sec after just eight months of full-time training at Lee Valley Athletics Centre. He is thinking of giving up his football ambitions, having played for Blue Square Bet South side Thurrock last season.

Non-League football or the fast lane to sprinting riches in track and field’s most lucrative pursuit?

‘This year may decide it,’ said Gemili. This weekend may decide it for many: it is Olympic qualification or heartbreak for them.

We start tonight with the 100 metres heats, starring Gemili and James Dasaolu. They have both run the qualifying time of 10.18sec, so a top-two finish in tomorrow’s final would mean they are Olympics- bound.

What a tonic for Britain’s bleak 100m scene it would be to see Gemili competing in London. He is slow out of the blocks but blessed with raw, bullocking speed. He is quiet by nature, the antithesis on the start line of a  Maurice Greene-like macho prowler, and just starting to understand his high-speed craft, adding awareness to nature.

But what of Dwain Chambers? He has only managed 10.28sec this year, a  sluggish report sheet that  threatens to render the regrettable  decision to overturn the British Olympic Association’s lifetime ban on serious dopers a personal irrelevance.

Tough task: Dwain Chambers

Now 34, Chambers has been the daddy of British sprinting for a depressingly long and stagnant period. But his chances of knocking one-tenth of a second off his best time this season and finishing in the top two are remote, given the anticipated wind and rain.

If Gemili and Dasaolu cement the two automatic places, a third place can be awarded at the discretion of the selectors, but only if Chambers clocks the qualifying time by the cut-off of July 1.

Over in Bath, Malcolm Arnold, the master hurdles coach who was deservedly appointed an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday  Honours, was in rhapsodical form — at least by his famously taciturn standards.

‘I was blase about the Olympics being in London,’ he said, ‘until I saw the torch relay go through Bath. I was staggered watching it. I also watched Colin Jackson run through Swansea. I saw how people felt. It was unbounded, as if people couldn’t help themselves.’

Arnold is a former schoolmaster and hardly a newcomer to this world. Indeed, when he was national coach in Idi Amin’s Uganda ahead of the Mexico City Games of 1968 there was no need for trials. He took a team of three.

Mo Farah: speed work

Four years later, while still in Africa, John Akii-Bua became the first of Arnold’s Olympic champions with a world record in the 400m hurdles.

Now, aged 72, he hopes to coach his next, though not necessarily his last, gold medallist in that same event, Dai Greene. He is one of five hurdlers to meet the qualifying time, along with training partner Jack Green, Nathan Woodward, Rick Yates and Rhys Williams.

‘I’ve done some of my best training ever in the last 10 days,’ said Greene, the world champion. ‘I’m back to my old self.’ His best time of a season interrupted by illness and knee  surgery is 48.96sec.

Arnold said: ‘I was concerned for Dai for a while.

‘Rehabilitation after the operation did not go as well as hoped but the last month has been OK and the last few weeks have gone really well.

‘He is coming  into a vein of form. Everything’s fine.

‘Some people say this will be a tough race for Dai but I don’t think it will be as hard as the World Championships final . . . ’

Another interesting duel involves Arnold-coached sprinters in the 110m hurdles. His Andy Pozzi and Lawrence Clarke, an old Etonian who plays up to the aristocratic stereotype like a good sport, take on Andy Turner, the European and Commonwealth champion, who is the slowest of the trio this year and has an achilles problem.

What other highlights?

We have Mo Farah working on his speed in the 1500m, having secured his place at 5,000m and 10,000m.

If he wins, he will show off his new ‘Mobot’ celebration, dreamed up on Sky’s A League of Their Own  programme. It involves putting both hands on his head to form an ‘M’. Let’s reserve judgment on that one.

We’ll see how Delano Williams, the 200m sprinter from the British  overseas territory Turks and Caicos,  performs under Birmingham skies that are nothing like a Caribbean summer.

We’ll watch three go into two in the 800m, in which Andrew Osagie, Michael Rimmer and Gareth  Warburton are separated by three-tenths of a second. It’s crunch time for them, and the rest.

London has never seemed closer yet precariously far away than in the Alexander Stadium this weekend.