The cane is black and elegant instead of white and obvious. The scratched spectacles are more to protect his eyes from dust than for vision, since all he can make out now are bright colours and shapes.

"I get blasted fed up and frustrated at times," McDonald Bailey, 78, was saying about a month ago over tea and currant rolls in his favourite café downtown.

Bit by bit, over the last 15 years, glaucoma has been stealing the sight of this former Olympic sprinter and world record holder. First he had to stop driving, then he couldn't recognize faces, and now he can't read his own letters from fans and autograph collectors around the world.

The man once known in Europe as the Black Flash now listens at street corners for the sound of traffic and the voices of passers-by who might help him to cross busy streets.

Over six feet tall, he's remained lean and lanky, sloping forward at the shoulders. The forehead is more prominent now owing to male pattern baldness that began in his forties but lots of silvery waves lie in a disciplined fashion at the back of his neck.

He jokes about his black cane, which is shaped like the number seven. "You see when I get tired I can do this," and he put it under his crotch, folded his long arms and just leaned there elegantly, like an ibis in a suit.

"I know how many steps to Tragarete Road. It's 64," he said, about his daily solo outings from his home in Woodbrook to Port of Spain. Then the saleswoman at Tony's Parlour will run out, calling, "Mr. Mac, Mr. Mac," and see him safely across the street and someone else will help him into a taxi.

He knows he's found Colsort Mall, Frederick Street by the bold red railings and he spends every afternoon in the Balcony tea shop, lingering over lunch, chatting up the manageress and talking with friends about the grand old days when he was treated like royalty in England.

"The alternative is to stay home and that will be the end of me. I can't watch the TV, I can't listen to 102 all the time. And so I come out," he said.

Some people recognize him there at his special table near the door, as did a medical supplies salesman who grumbled loudly that Trinidad threw away its heroes.

That is a topic Bailey himself picks at regularly. His forehead puckers. He makes a steeple with his fingers - he has unbelievably silky hands - and he goes on like a disappointed schoolmaster about how difficult it is to make a contribution without people thinking one is bragging.

The blindness expanded Bailey's already elephantine memory so that he remembers dates, phone numbers, names and how to spell them, and that it was Wendell Mottley who ran the final relay leg in the Tokyo Olympics.

Now Bailey has recorded some of the events stored in his memory in a soon-to-be-launched booklet, endorsed by the Education and Information Ministries.

It's a thin document about athletic milestones, from the barefoot distance runner Mannie Dookie of the 1930s to Ato Boldon's brave bronze medal run at the Los Angeles Olympics.

Bailey said he was reluctant at first to write it because people might think he was showing off; his name appears again and again. But for the sake of history, he believed such a work should be published.

"I'm getting older every day. I'll go and they'd be writing all sorts of stupid misinformation about who Bailey was."

Bailey was a skinny little boy from Hardbargain, Williamsville who liked to run down a hill in his village just to get that rush from making himself go so fast. He still has the scars on his knees from one nasty spill on the raw, unpaved road.

His father, Charles McDonald Bailey, who became the principal of Tranquillity Boys' in Port of Spain, was an elegant batsman, but his son gave up cricket lessons under George John the day a cork ball caught him in the chest.

Instead, the reluctant batsman grew up to break British national track records and pack them in at White City, London in the Forties and Fifties. He won 15 British open national titles, a world record, which got him in the Guinness Book of Records and kept him there for 43 years. One journalist described him at a race as "moving away from the field like a rippling panther".

He shmoozed with rising movie stars like Diana Dors and Joan Collins and was presented to the Queen.

But a year before the 1948 Olympics, Bailey failed to warm up properly before an inter-counties championship at White City and tore a muscle nearly off the bone while moving at 24 mph. He limped the last 25 yards of the race, dragging his left leg - and still won.

Doctors said he would never sprint again.

But he did - making it to the finals of the 1948 Olympics. He finished last in a field of six.

But four years later at the Helsinki Olympics, when he was 31, and on a waterlogged track, after drawing one of the two worst lanes which caught the dripping rain water from the stadium roof, Bailey placed third in a photo-finish. All top three medallists clocked the same time of 10.4 seconds.

Retiring from competition, Bailey worked as athletics adviser for large companies in Guyana and Trinidad.

Ten years ago, he retired from his job at the National Energy Corp and as his eyesight worsened, ran out of ways to keep busy. He wrote a column for the Catholic News for nine years until he couldn't see what he was writing.

He compiled the Milestones booklet by dictating what he wanted to say to friends and had former Olympic Committee president Alec Chapman do some fact checking.

Most of all, the project gave him something to do.

His wife, Doris, whom he married in 1946, lives in England, taking care of grandchildren. All but one of his five children are also overseas.

But he has the goodwill of friends and the kindness of strangers who don't know the elderly blind man they are helping across the street used to be a star.

And for now he also has his Milestones.

"I used to be very bitter," Bailey said about the blindness. "But I learn to accept things even though I do a lot of thinking."

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