Fury, when harnessed properly, can be a powerful motivational weapon in sport. It can clarify the muddled mind, sharpen the focus and become the inspiration for improbable acts of defiance. It can, of course, also consume the athlete. For every John McEnroe surge after a line call went against him, there was a counter-balancing implosion when rage and his sense of victimisation blunted his edge.

For Britain’s quartet of sprinters at the Athens Olympics in 2004 – Jason Gardener, Darren Campbell, Marlon Devonish and Mark Lewis-Francis – there was no downside to the angry emotions they channelled into victory over a crack USA team who were odds-on favourites for gold. When Lewis-Francis breasted the tape one hundredth of a second ahead of Maurice Greene, the four savoured revenge over their critics and spoke of the sense of injustice that had been their spur. The serenity expected of winners was absent.

They said they had been determined to leave Athens with their heads held high and Campbell stared directly into the television camera to taunt those who had doubted and abused him. Some commentators thought it unedifying. The more sympathetic among them found it difficult to begrudge his jubilant relish in milking his moment of redemption.

Bungled baton changes had ruined Great Britain’s expectations of a relay medal at the previous two Games. In 1996 in the third heat at Atlanta, Campbell had been running the third leg when Darren Braithwaite approached him for the handover. Campbell came out of his box too quickly and although he tried to retrieve the situation by hesitating and clutching at the falling baton he failed to prevent it hitting the ground. Having stooped to pick it up he then launched it across the track in exasperation, knowing that he would have to face Linford Christie who had been rested for the heat in anticipation of running in the semi-final.

“Linford has never been to a major championships and not won a medal,” he said. “We were really going out there to do something for him. He isn’t going to be too pleased with me. Everything had gone so well in training but these things happen in relays. To think I came all this way and ended up running just three yards.”

Four years later in Sydney, Campbell could empathise more strongly with Christie’s emotions. At the 1999 World Championships he had been in the team finishing second and with a potential final quartet of himself, the 200m silver medallist, Gardener, Christian Malcolm, who was fifth in the 200m final and Dwain Chambers, fourth in the 100m, they had realistic hopes of victory.

Instead, given that the relay heats took place the day after the 200m final, he rested and watched as two dreadful handovers scuppered his chances. First Allyn Condon and Gardener messed up – “fumbling around like a couple of Mr Magoos,” wrote the Evening Standard’s Ian Chadband – then Devonish and Chambers cocked up the final change when the latter set off too early from an irretrievable position seconds behind the field. For the second successive Olympics, Britain’s men’s 4x100m squad had failed to get the baton to the finish line legally.

Frustration was the overriding sentiment expressed in the reports of both fiascos, making the point that lottery-funded athletes who spent hours drilling the changes should not have made such straightforward errors. It seemed even more wasteful when contrasted with their performances in the European and world championships. In Budapest in 1998 a scratch squad of Condon, Campbell, Douglas Walker and Julian Golding had taken European gold and a year later in Seville Gardener, Devonish, Campbell and Chambers won silver at the worlds, 0.14sec behind the USA.

In the cycle before Athens Christian Malcolm, Campbell, Devonish and Chambers won gold at the Europeans in Munich and silver at the World Championships in Paris. Previously the question of illegality had been essentially benign, consigned to issues of box transgressions at changeovers. For the 2002 and 2003 championships, however, it was far more serious. Thirty days before the relay finals at the world championships Chambers had provided a sample in a mandatory out-of-competition drugs test on 1 August. In October, when it was reanalysed, Chambers tested positive for the banned steroid tetrahydrogestrinone and the following April, after his confession, the British athletes were stripped of their silver medal. Two years later they also lost their European title when Chambers confessed that his use of THG had pre-dated his positive test by 18 months.

It had already been decided that the heats system used for Olympics Games in the past would be abandoned in favour of inviting only the top 16 relay squads in the IAAF’s rankings. By stripping out every race in which Chambers had participated from 1 August 2003 onwards Great Britain slipped to 15th place and faced a summer of uncertainty over qualification had they dropped the baton in ranking events.

On losing his silver medal from Paris, Campbell understandably sounded unenthusiastic about persevering as a member of the 4x100m squad. “It makes me think: What’s the point of running relays?” he said. “It makes me think twice about running the relay in Athens. I may as well stick to individual events. At least then I know I’m clean. In the relay, four guys go out there. You give your best and you presume everyone you work with is clean.”

Yet, as captain of the men’s athletics team for the Athens Games, he quickly relented and claimed that the experience “will just lift and inspire the team more to achieve in the summer”. Whether he was referring to the sprinters or the whole track and field squad was not clear but, by the time of the heats on Friday 27 August, the quartet represented Britain’s sole realistic hope of a men’s medal to save Campbell from the indignity of becoming the captain of the only British men’s team to return home from the Games without a single medal.

It was just one of several indignities threatening Campbell over the summer. In July his former team-mate turned BBC commentator Colin Jackson said that it would be difficult for a Briton even to reach a final in Athens and actually winning a medal was “completely out of reach”. “There’s a lot of B-standard athletes. We used to have one or two A-plus boys but now they’ve disappeared,” he said. Michael Johnson, the four-time Olympic gold medallist and Jackson’s BBC colleague, echoed Jackson’s criticisms saying that medal-winners needed talent, mental strength and the ability to handle pressure and that British sprinters were lacking in one or more qualities.

Campbell was incensed. “Colin’s remarks were unprofessional and uncalled for and I really have no idea why he made them,” he said. “He should know athletics is all about confidence. If you aren’t confident, your performance levels drop. There are a lot of young guys out there trying to achieve on the big stage. But then they see Colin Jackson, someone they respect, saying they are not good enough.”

And yet Jackson’s prediction proved accurate. For the first time since 1976 Britain did not have a male sprinter in either the 100m or 200m finals. Campbell, suffering from a hamstring injury, took drastic action to get himself in shape for his individual events, going aboard a private yacht moored in the Aegean to consult a Chinese herbalist in a last-ditch effort to cure the problem. But he failed to make it out of the heats in the 100m and, though Gardener and Lewis-Francis succeeded in qualifying for the semi-finals, both finished fifth.

In the 200m Campbell finished fourth in his second-round heat but hobbled off the track again clutching his right hamstring and then trailed in last in his semi-final. At that point Johnson questioned his motives. “No one’s ever questioned he’s a great athlete,” Johnson said. “But he’s obviously not in shape right now. So why not just say that? Everyone will respect that. But when you pull a hamstring you’re out for six weeks, you can’t run. I felt bad for Darren coming off the track wincing. But then he said: ‘I’m going to run the semi-final.’ I felt like I’d been taken advantage of as a viewer and supporter of Darren.”

The same night Campbell and Johnson inadvertently met at an MTV party in the city. “After I came last in my 200m semi-final Linford didn’t want me to be on my own so he took me out,” said Campbell. “We went to a music awards and bumped into Michael Johnson. I knew he’d questioned my injury on TV so I fronted him. “He said: ‘I don’t think there is anything wrong with you.’

“I said: ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ He just answered ‘that’s my opinion’ and walked away.

“I’m sure he thinks his comments make good TV but it’s a cheap shot and the British public deserve the facts. Nothing was going to stop me trying – I don’t quit. I had hours of physio and nine injections to get me through the first round of the 100m and three in the 200m.

“I always give 100%. I shouldn’t even have to defend myself but he’s wrong. I was in tears after the first round of the 200m on Tuesday morning and as low as I’ve been for a long time. I was on the verge of going home but I thought: ‘No.’ I tell kids don’t give up, do your best. It would have been two-faced to walk away.”

It is doubtful whether two relay races, each of about 40 seconds’ duration, ever had such an intimidating backdrop: successive failures at the two previous Olympics, disqualification from the World Championships over doping, the possible shame of the men’s track and field team leaving a Games without a medal and biting criticism from two former elite athletes that the sprinters interpreted as an attack on their integrity.

The semi-final took place two days after Campbell’s confrontation with Johnson. Britain were drawn in the second heat alongside the USA who rested the 100m champion Justin Gatlin for Darvis Patton but included the sub-10 second Coby Miller, the 200m gold medallist Shawn Crawford and the 100m gold medal winner from Sydney and former world record holder Maurice Greene. Britain led off with Gardener but rarely looked in a position to threaten the American team and almost threw away their chance when the final baton change from Devonish to Lewis-Francis was fumbled and the anchor only marginally stayed within the confines of his box. Although they finished second their time made them only the fifth equal fastest qualifier.

At 9.30pm in the Olympic Stadium, minutes after Britain’s Kelly Holmes had won the 1,500m to add to her 800m gold, Gardener, Campbell, Devonish and Lewis-Francis walked out on to the track. Having watched Holmes’s triumphant lap of honour, Campbell turned to his team-mates and said: “We can’t just win a medal now. It has to be gold.”

But there was to be a further handicap. When the starter fired the gun at 9.45pm, Gardener was too quick out of his blocks in lane three and false started. Up went the flag on his lane marker, knowing that he would have to be more reticent the second time and hand his rivals a split-second advantage in preference to disqualification.

The next start went smoothly and Crawford powered away in lane five but Gardener kept pace with him around the bend and surrendered only the slightest edge which he made up when Crawford had to slow down because Gatlin was apprehensive about the changeover.

When Gardener handed the baton to Campbell the Mancunian matched Gatlin’s speed and kept Britain firmly in contention along with Nigeria. Campbell then passed on to Devonish without a hitch but in lane five a misunderstanding between Gatlin and Miller squandered the USA’s marginal lead. Miller went too soon, stopped himself and lost his momentum. “Justin and I were really bad,” he said afterwards. I heard him call ‘Stick!’ but the crowd was into it and by the time I heard it I was at the end of the zone. I didn’t want to go out of the zone and not get a medal at all [by getting disqualified].” Gatlin then compounded the error by stepping on Miller’s foot leaving him to run the third leg with a hole in his shoe.

Miller fought back well to draw level with the Nigerians in second place but Devonish, who ran a flawless leg, was about two metres ahead when he executed a perfect exchange to Lewis-Francis. Britain’s anchor stormed down the home straight, arms pumping, his eyes fixed on the line. Greene overtook Nigeria’s Deji Aliu with 70m to go and centimetre-by-centimetre narrowed the gap on Lewis-Francis.

Twenty metres from the line it seemed certain that Greene would prevail but with 10m left Lewis-Francis continued to hold him off and maintain the tightest of leads. Since winning the world junior championships 100m in 2000, Lewis-Francis’s failure to kick on had brought accusations that his mental fragility had betrayed his immense talent. Moments such as these were when he was supposed to crack. It was all down to the dip, now.

Greene had made up a metre, then more centimetres but by the time they hit the tape, almost simultaneously, Lewis-Francis had managed a successful defence of that crucial last millimetre. The winning margin was one-hundredth of a second, or, appropriately enough, the width of the Team GB vest. For only the second time, the USA had been beaten in the event they considered theirs by birthright.

Afterwards, after embracing, all four addressed their critics. “We have gone and proved everyone wrong, all the people who were talking negative about us,” said Lewis-Francis. “I wasn’t worried about Maurice. I knew I had it won as soon as I got the baton.”

When it was Campbell’s turn, the months of pressure and what he considered to be defamation shaped his words. “I’ve always gone out there and done the best for my country,” he said. “What I want to say to Michael Johnson is with my solicitors but there is something I’d like to say to Colin Jackson … I’ve got a gold medal.” To Campbell, revenge was a dish best served at incandescent heat to match his fury.

How the Guardian covered the story