Berry's briefest of brief encounters...

TEN summer Olympiads have come and all but gone since Marty Berry went off on a sprint which made Noah Lyles' in Paris the other night feel a bit sluggish.

The turbo-charged American hadn't been born when Berry achieved the unprecedented feat of compressing an entire Test rugby career into a few seconds fewer than the time it took Lyles to win gold even if that meant waiting for the technology to determine his victory by one five-thousandth of a second.

While Lyles' hanging about for the verdict would have seemed like an eternity, it was nothing compared to Berry's. He spent the remaining seven years of his rugby life yearning for another chance to come under starter's orders for the All Blacks in a Test match.

It never came, saddling him with the memory of an encounter almost too brief for belief. No matter how successful Lyles continues to be in reducing the 100 metres to a still more gob-smacking exercise in brevity, Berry's track record will take some beating.

He emerged as a late replacement for Frano Botica against Australia at Eden Park in 1986, so late that the three-Test series had been lost.