Jesse Williams is usually a pretty calm guy.

But when he got his first look at the official start list for the men’s high jump at the 35th annual Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field on Sunday, his eyes lit up and he couldn’t hold back an ear-to-ear grin.

“I’m pumped,” he said. “I mean, really pumped.”

Williams, the reigning U.S. high jump champion after winning last summer’s Olympic Trials, has already set personal bests indoors (7 feet, 8 3/4 inches) and outdoors (7-8) this year, and he can’t imagine a better stage to showcase his skills than the Pre Classic in his adopted hometown of Eugene.

Outside of the Olympics, he has seldom seen a better field of high jumpers.

The top Americans?

They’re all here. Williams, Jamie Nieto, Andra Manson and Dusty Jonas were ranked 1-2-3-4 in the U.S. by Track & Field News magazine last season, with Williams earning his third straight world ranking at No. 6.

Olympic medalists?

They’re on the list. Russia’s Andrey Silnov won gold, Great Britain’s Germaine Mason claimed silver and Russia’s Yaroslav Rybakov took home bronze from Beijing last summer.

World champions and world leaders?

You bet. Donald Thomas of Bahamas won the world title in 2007, while Russia’s Ivan Ukhov and Germany’s Raul Spank have the third- and fourth-best jumps outdoors this season at 7-8 and 7-7, respectively.

It’s exactly what Williams craves as an athlete.

“I love competing against the best in the world,” he said. “And that entire field is just nasty. You can’t really get much better than that.”

The 25-year-old Williams is banking on the home-field advantage.

This will be his third Pre Classic — he placed second in 2007 and third in ’08 — and after setting his outdoor PR of 7-8 at the Oregon Twilight meet on May 9, a jump which elicited one of the loudest roars of the season at Hayward Field, he figures his profile has been raised a notch in Track Town, USA.

Even if he’s not a distance runner.

“A lot more people know who I am now,” said Williams, a former Pac-10 and NCAA champion at USC in 2005. “They’re going to be ready to cheer for me, so I’m going to be ready to put on a show for them.

“I’m definitely one of a kind out here. I’m the only one that’s actually on this field everyday training while everybody else is running circles around me, and that’s what Eugene is known for, distance running. I’m not necessarily saying that I’m trying to make this Field Town, USA, but maybe a little more emphasis on track and field, for sure.”

For the most part, Williams trains in solitude.

His coach, Kansas State’s Cliff Rovelto, lives 2,000 miles away in Manhattan, Kan. He provides Williams with a daily workout plan that is so meticulous, and so detailed, that Williams finds it easy to manage.

He still travels back to Kansas a few times each year to iron out any technical issues, but Williams has been competing on the international scene for five years now, and at this point in his career, he has one simple mantra.

“Stay strong,” he said. “I train about six days a week, running a couple of days, doing lots of core work and lifting three or four times a week. I really enjoy the Olympic lifts, cleans and snatches, and I think that’s beneficial to jumping high.”

Williams, who stands a shade under 6-foot-1 and weighs about 170 pounds, lists 282 pounds as his record in the snatch lift and 215 pounds in the clean and jerk.

He traces his strength development back to his days as a prep wrestler in Raleigh, N.C.

Williams wrestled all four years at Broughton High School, compiling a 39-2 record as a senior, when he placed third in the state championships at 145 pounds.

At the same time, he was a three-time state champion in the high jump, and he still holds the North Carolina prep record of 7-3.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a wrestler at heart,” Williams said. “It’s still my favorite sport and I almost decided to do wrestling instead of track. … The last time I ever cried was at my last wrestling match. I couldn’t believe it was done and I gave my coach a hug. I really did love it and I knew that would be the end for me.”

He said he still taps into his wrestling roots whenever he needs to raise the energy level in the high jump.

“Wrestling molded me into some of the character I bring out when I compete,” he said.

“I’m usually pretty calm and quiet as a person, but when I get out high jumping, that’s my element. I get really excited and I go a little bit nuts.

“It’s showtime.”

Although he was disappointed with his Olympic performance in which he bowed out of qualifying at 7-4 1/2, Williams said a more relaxed approach to his sport has allowed him to see better results this year.

After Pre, he’s scheduled to jump in Toronto on June 11; Vancouver, B.C. at the Harry Jerome Meet on June 14; and then back to Eugene for a final week of hard training before the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships, June 25-28, at Hayward Field.

A full slate of European meets are already on the docket leading up to the World Championships in Berlin.

“Everything is so relaxed now, it just happens, instead of trying to force it,” Williams said. “I think that will enable me to jump to my potential.”

There are worse things than finishing fourth at the Olympics. Like finishing fifth.

You might think Gary Reed would consider falling a step short of the medal podium in the 800 metres last August at the Summer Games in Beijing as one of the most disappointing days of his life. You’d be wrong.

“Lots of people love to say that,” Reed said this week from his Victoria home. “But finishing fourth at the Olympics is better than finishing 10th, and 10th is better than finishing 20th and so on. Obviously, you want to win a medal. But do I feel better coming fourth at the Olympics as opposed to ’04, when I came 17th? Yeah, I do. It’s a great accomplishment.”

So was winning a silver medal at the 2007 track and field world championships in Osaka. So was just making it to the world stage in athletics for a runner who grew up in a trailer court in Merritt, raised by a single mother without the money for her son to play any sport that required more than a pair of shoes and the drive to succeed.

“To me, it never mattered where I was born or where I came from,” Reed said. “I don’t feel I was up against these great barriers or great walls. People have to come from somewhere. Not all great runners in this world are from Africa.”

Run as far as Reed has and fourth place at the Olympics seems pretty good, and so does the idea of trying to better it in 2012 in London.

Reed begins that journey Saturday in New York, where he’ll open his 2009 race season at the Reebok Grand Prix.

The 27-year-old Canadian record-holder visits Vancouver Monday to speak to elementary school kids about the Olympics and dreaming big.

Then it’s on to the prestigious Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore., next weekend before running the 800 in the Harry Jerome International Classic June 14 at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby.

Reed believes he can win the world championship in August in Berlin, and that he could be faster at age 30 in the London Olympics than he was at 26 in China.

Taking it easy the season after Beijing never entered his mind.

“There has to be some kind of reset mode after an Olympics,” he said. “They always say that’s the toughest year to compete — after an Olympics. But for me, I’ve made a lot of changes in this last year and I think that really helped to break things up. I spent the winter training in Arizona and it totally changed my approach with the amount of work I could do with the weather down there. If I’d stayed in Victoria, I think I’d have found a really hard time getting motivated to train and get up and go hard.

“If I just up and took a year off, that’s called retirement. Maybe some athletes can do that. In track, you take a year off, you’re as good as done.”

Reed spent the winter in the sun training with British half-miler Darren St. Clair. He is still coached by Wynn Gmitroski out of Victoria, but said training in Arizona has him better prepared than ever for the summer meet season.

Certainly, Reed said, he is healthier. His winter training a year ago was undermined by foot, hamstring and Achilles tendon injuries.

Reed said he didn’t get fit until last summer. He broke his own Canadian record in July, running 1:43.68 in Monaco, so he was peaking for Beijing.

The men’s 800 was so deep and competitive that neither reigning Olympic champion Yuriy Borzakovskiy of Russia nor Sudan’s Abubaker Kaki, who earlier in the summer had posted the fastest half-mile of the last five years, made the eight-man final in China.

Reed ran at the back of the pack most of the race before kicking past half the field to finish in 1:44.94, 12/100ths behind bronze medalist Alfred Kirwa Yego of Kenya. His countryman, Wilfred Bungei, won in 1:44.65.

“I wasn’t able to get as sharp as I wanted to be as early as I wanted to be in the season,” he said. “I was ready for the Games, but it was probably too much of a struggle to get to where I needed to get to. Whatever’s done is done. You get the cards you’re dealt and make the best of them. I don’t have any regrets.”

Reed is looking forward to Vancouver, both for the Jerome meet and the Jerome Outreach Program, which has him headed Monday to Thunderbird Elementary School in East Vancouver as part of an initiative to provide inner-city kids with professional coaching. Those kids will run in the Jerome Classic, too.

“Coming from my background, I would much rather go to the inner-city schools,” Reed said. “You look at the years and go ‘wow.’ But it wasn’t that long ago that I was in elementary school and there were athletes coming to visit my school.”

And none of them made an Olympic final.

imacintyre@vancouversun.com

Rohan Stewart’s still a little slow coming out of the starting blocks and his coaches will tell you that his arm movement isn’t quite right when he’s at top speed.

And the 18-year-old sprinter is still a little shaky when he takes a corner in one of his 200- or 400-metre races.

But for someone who’s been running track seriously for barely a year, the guy flat out flies. He has already posted times that qualify him for the Pan American Junior Championships later this summer. He hopes to improve on them at the Harry Jerome International Track Classic on June 14 at Swangard Stadium.

“All the technical stuff, I still need to go over it,” says Stewart, who runs for the University of B.C. track team and with his UBC coach Laurier Primeau with the Vancouver Thunderbirds in the summer.

“I’m making progress. Laurier has helped me a ton but there’s still a lot more to learn, like my reaction time in the blocks, and understanding how to run relaxed.”

Stewart’s running is certainly more relaxed than it was two years ago. Two years ago he was running scared.

In the summer before his Grade 12 year at Vancouver’s Templeton Secondary, he got into an argument with some thugs at a friend’s birthday party. A guy pulled out a metal bar and hit him in the head.

“It was just dumb high school drama, people not getting along,” says Stewart of the incident.

“It was just the wrong guys that I wasn’t getting along with. We just got into an argument and a guy pulled out a baton and hit me in the head. I had some medical issues throughout the summer and the rest of the year. I’d had minor brain trauma.”

The police got involved and suggested Stewart move to another school. It was like a door had been opened to him.

Stewart, who had dabbled in track at Templeton and played community league football for the Renfrew Trojans (Templeton doesn’t have a football program) knew that Vancouver College had quality sports programs.

Stewart applied to the private school, got accepted and played football and ran track during the 2007-08 year at Vancouver College. Recruited by UBC for football, Stewart has now put the gridiron on hold so he can concentrate on track.

“Sometimes to even think about it … from where I was to where I am now, most people would never think that such a turnaround could happen,” Stewart, who dreams of representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics in London, says of his journey from a near tragic argument to a shot at the Games. “From playing sports, but not at the level I am now, to where I’m at …”

And London 2012 is far from farfetched.

Last summer, just three weeks into working with Primeau, he ran a 10.65-second 100 metres and a 21.63-second 200.

His personal bests at the distance are 10.64 in the 100 and 21.24 in the 200. Those times meet the qualifying standard for PanAms (July 21-Aug. 2 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad) but he’ll have to meet them again this summer.

Stewart has run only two 400-metre races in his life. He put down a 49.41 in his first race and then lowered it to 48.12.

Some coaches think he’s better suited to the 400 metres or even the 800 than the 100 or 200.

“There’s no question that he can improve enough to compete at the world championship and Olympic level,” says Primeau.

“He’s been doing track and field for less than a year. He joined our team group last June after high school and he improved by four/10ths [of a second] in one month.

“He’s only 18 but his training age is less than one.”

tbell@theprovince.com