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Two years ago, Sanya Richards-Ross could barely have imagined this moment.

Skip to Sunday night, when she ran down the final stretch to gold in the women’s 400 meters, there were no doubts, no lingering fears, no pain. There was only her two churning legs and an empty track ahead.

In 2010, amid a series of freakish injuries, Richards-Ross doubted everything. Already, she had finished third at the Beijing Games when she looked certain to win gold. And then, just when she was putting that behind her, it seemed that she started falling apart. Time and again, she would ask her body to do those things it once had done without conscious thought – to find that extra gear – and it would no longer answer.

At last year’s world championships, she finished seventh. To win gold Sunday, Richards-Ross came back from that place perhaps most dreaded by many elite athletes: the fear that injury has changed them forever. As sport science improves, it is offering athletes unprecedented insight into the workings of their own bodies – splendid organic machines finely tuned, like Ferraris of flesh and bone. When tendons are oddly loose or muscles are not firing as they once did, the athletes of today know it.

But when this machine breaks down, it can lead to an almost metaphysical angst. Gone are the days when trainers just told athletes to go to bed and see if it feels better in the morning. Diagnoses are now pin point and specific, and if going under the anatomical hood doesn’t work, the mental toll can be severe.

“The mental part of coming back form injury is the major thing, not the physical,” said Richards-Ross at a media summit in May. “The mental aspect would hold you back from pushing yourself to that place physically.”

“To get back to that place where you run fast, there has to be no fear, no inhibition,” she said.

On the USA Track & Field website, Ralph Mann is listed as a specialist in performance enhancement through technical model optimization for sprint development. What that means is that he’s got a lot of cool gadgets to help runners figure out how to be faster. If American runners are 007 on a gold-medal mission, then he is Q.