The most notable achievement so far by an American male sprinter at the World Championships in Paris was to hold up the meet for a half-hour while he threw a world-class fit.

The ugly American – some surprise – turned out to be Jon Drummond.

Trying to get out of town before track’s top officials kicked him out, Drummond announced Tuesday he was pulling out of the rest of the meet, and the remainder of the 2003 season for good measure. But that didn’t satisfy the honchos at the International Association of Athletics Federations.

They wanted to see the door hit Drummond on the way out. So they, too, announced he was being tossed “for behavior bringing the sport into disrepute,” and some IAAF officials don’t want to stop there.

We’ll get to what Drummond did to merit double-secret probation, but first, his apology:

“I felt very strongly that I was disqualified from the race unfairly, and I protested my disqualification,” he said in a statement that sounded like it was written for him by Robert Downey Jr. “It was never my intention to harm the sport in any way or to inconvenience my fellow competitors or the fans.”

Three years ago at the Sydney Olympics, Drummond ran the first leg for the gold medal-winning U.S. men’s 400-meter relay team, then joined his teammates in a hugging, mugging, preening, flexing, posing and clowning display during the national anthem. Told afterward that most Americans watching back home were mad enough to stick a foot through their TVs, Drummond came up with this classic of contrition all by himself:

“Jon Drummond never won an Olympic gold before,” he said, losing the rest of his countrymen because of an annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person, “so sorry.”

In this latest incident, Drummond ran afoul of a new rule governing false starts and was disqualified in his Sunday heat for the 100-meter race. What followed was 30 minutes of hilarity.

First, Drummond lay down on the track and wouldn’t get up. Then he rolled across the infield grass sobbing and later dunked his head into the steeplechase pit and splashed water around. Then he ripped off his shirt, struck a Charles Atlas pose, and just for good measure, hugged his coach and granted an interview.

And all the while, Drummond kept arguing with officials and shamelessly playing to the stadium crowd like some cross between Nancy Kerrigan and Chris Rock.

It might have been funnier, too, if Drummond wasn’t about to turn 35 and run out of chances, or if the Summer Games weren’t less than a year away – opening ceremonies begin Aug. 13 in Athens – or if Drummond’s sidekicks were treating the rest of the world at this meet the way U.S. sprinters usually do: like props.

Instead, it’s the Americans who keep turning up in the background of everybody else’s highlights – though Jerome Young finally claimed gold in the 400 meters.

Maurice Greene, who just turned 29 and is the reigning Olympic and three-time world champion, finished eighth out of nine sprinters in his semifinal heat after injuring his thigh.

“He’s been finished since last year,” Michael Johnson, who owns a drawer full of golds from the worlds and Olympics, said of Greene in a column he’s writing for a French newspaper. “He will never get back to his best form.”

Tim Montgomery, who holds the world record of 9.78 seconds, made the final, but was plagued by a bad start and never got hold of the race. He finished fifth – the worst placing by an American since 1995 and only the second time since the worlds began in 1983 that U.S. men failed to win a medal of any color.

At least Montgomery, 28, had an excuse. He was distracted. Montgomery and top U.S. female sprinter Marion Jones had a child together and caught some flak for hiring and then quickly firing defrocked Canadian coach Charlie Francis, whose most famous client to that point was steroid-primed sprinter Ben Johnson.

Worse, the so-called future of U.S. men’s sprinting didn’t even make it as far as Paris. Former two-time NCAA champion Justin Gatlin finished 17th in qualifying at the U.S. nationals two months ago. Though just 21, he’s already shown a worrisome inability to focus at crucial moments in a sport already chockfull with head cases.

“Sometimes you’re up,” Gatlin said at the time, “and sometimes you’re down.”

Well, this is one of those times when the entire U.S. men’s team is down.

Way down.

Drummond’s DQ means he can’t run a leg for the 400-meter relay, another event which U.S. men have dominated over the years, except for the occasional disqualification or screwed-up baton pass. Greene already pulled out and Montgomery blew out of town Tuesday without an explanation.

Some people will say none of this matters with 11-plus months left to go, but the folks at NBC must be quivering already. Track is supposed to be the centerpiece of the televised coverage from Athens, but the way the U.S. men are performing in the highest-profile events sounds more like a show that could be called “Americans Idle.”

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org