The unique convergence of spectacular achievement, special time and place, and creative image allows certain athletes to make indelible impressions on the popular mind. Michael Johnson exempli-fies this phenomenon—his name evokes memories of an unprecedented accomplishment in track and field, the 1996 Olympic Summer Games at Atlanta, and golden running shoes. Few athletes have more consciously planned their moment of greatest triumph than did Johnson. Deprived of individual achievement in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona by illness and aware of the American public's relative disinterest in track and field, he relentlessly determined that he would make the Atlanta Olympics uniquely his own. He resolved to win both the 200 and the 400 meter races in Atlanta, something that had never been attempted in the Olympics, and to do so while wearing golden shoes. The pre-Olympic pressure on Johnson was enormous, with the media nominating him in...