Given the background to the imminent IAAF World Championships in Moscow, and the enforced absence of notables in the highest of high profile events, the 100 metres, the sport is in urgent need of good news. Fast. What we want is excitement, the pure essence of sport. We need a fresh spring of it to gush through the Moscow Luzhniki Stadium.

Is that too much to hope for? It's happened before at the World Championships...

What I want to do now is to take you back, way back in time...then forward a bit, to 1999.

Bleach blond hair. Attitude. A recent history of bother in a McDonald's restaurant near his home at Canvey Island. In other words, Dean Macey.

Blond ambition...Dean Macey in action over 400m en route to putting himself on the world map with silver in Seville, 1999

At the IAAF World Championships in Seville, the most sensational performer to come out of Canvey Island since Dr Feelgood announced his arrival at world level in exuberant fashion, charging through his sequence of ten events despite - inevitably - nagging injury problems, and eventually winning silver behind the then defending champion and world record holder Tomas Dvorak of the Czech Republic.

The achievement was mighty - but it was the manner of the 21-year-old's showing which left an indelible impression. At times the man who slogged his guts out at his home track appeared like the old Victor comic figure, Alf Tupper, who would set out in battered gear against a field of immaculately clad toffs with the imprecation "I'll run 'em!"

I can still see him storming home to win his 400m event. I can still see him walking gingerly into his post-event press conference nursing injuries to his ankle and elbow.

Placed third before the concluding 1500m event, Macey ran himself to a standstill but finished unsure of whether he had earned a place on the podium or not. "I was walking around and people were shouting 'silver', 'second'", he said. "I didn't know whether to be sick, cry or pass out."

Macey may have been a silver medallist on that occasion, but he was always a gold medallist as far as talking was concerned, right up there in the Ato Boldon league.

Dean Macey (right) on the podium at the 1999 Seville World Championships alongside bronze medallist Chris Huffins and champion Tomas Dvorak of the Czech Republic

His days of shelf-stacking and working as a part-time lifeguard to make ends meet were formally consigned to the past within a couple of months of the Seville World Championships as he signed a three-year sponsorship with Asics worth an estimated £180,000 ($280,000/€210,000)

But as the brightest new star in the British athletics firmament spoke about his deal in the trendy setting of the Design Museum at London's Butler's Wharf, his words confirmed that, while you could take the boy out of Canvey Island, you couldn't take Canvey Island out of the boy. And what's more, the boy didn't want you to.

Macey still lived in his family home with his parents, still saw his mates in the pub - "they don't ask to buy me drinks, although they ask me if I should be downing them quite so quick, that's for sure" - and was still, well, Dean Macey.

To label Macey as an overnight success would have been an exaggeration. He had spent five years working to reach that point, having turned down the possibility of a career in football - he was on Arsenal's books as a youngster - in favour of athletics' most gruelling challenge. However, after his dramatic arrival into the public eye - "this time last year I was nowhere" - he confessed that it had taken a while for the measure of his achievement to sink in.

"I sit down and think about it from time to time, and it sends shivers up my spine," he said. "I kind of overshot my mark." He added: I've got no worries at the moment. My life is great - no other way of putting it."

Alas and alack, his athletics life was to be compromised all the way to the end, in 2008, by injuries and ill fortune.

He missed out on an Olympic medal by one place in 2000 after Estonia's Erki Nool had been controversially reinstated on appeal, taking gold, after what appeared to be three fouls in the discus.

Close, but no Olympic cigar - Macey missed out on a medal by one place at the Sydney 2000 Games after Erki Nool's controversial reinstatement. About which he abstained from comment...

A year after his Olympic disappointment, Macey returned to the World Championship arena in Edmonton – or Deadmonton, as it was named, by British 200m runner Marlon Devonish I believe. (The derogatory reference was taken up readily by the press and occasioned a diplomatic incident when it was noticed in the copy of the correspondent working in Canada for the Daily Telegraph – at that time one of the most accessible papers locally on the internet.)

There, as he had in Seville, he produced another personal best - 8,603 points, which was the most he ever achieved - but had to settle for bronze as Dvorak and Nool took gold and silver respectively.

Injuries forced him to miss the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, which would surely have offered him the chance of a first big gold, and after an eleventh hour qualification for the 2004 Olympics following injury he finished once again in fourth place.

Two years later, at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Macey - despite operating well below par because of injuries - earned the gold his career so richly deserved.

Gold at last - Macey takes a well-deserved place at the top of the podium at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne

And yet you could argue that the high point of his career came in the aftermath of the 2000 Sydney Olympic competition, when, despite being invited by the massed media to comment adversely on Nool's reinstatement, and his subsequent relegation from the podium, he consciously refrained from doing so - despite what he must have been feeling. It was an example of outstanding sportsmanship.

Somewhere in Moscow, now, there will be a relatively unknown male or female athlete whose name may resound in two weeks' time as Macey's did. We hope. We trust.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, covered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics as chief feature writer for insidethegames, having covered the previous five summer Games, and four winter Games, for The Independent. He has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. To follow him on Twitter click here.