By Tom Fordyce BBC Sport Online

What does Tim Montgomery's new 100m world record mean for the balance of power in world sprinting?

BBC Sport Online investigates.

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Tim Montgomery

When the dust has settled on Montgomery's stunning performance in Paris, the new world record holder will have a new focus for his winter's training - next summer's World Championships.

Montgomery can look to the recent past for inspiration.

Can Fly-Mo take world gold next summer?

Does he want to be a Leroy Burrell, a former world record holder who will never be remembered as an all-time great because he failed to win an individual world or Olympic title?

Or does he want to achieve the sporting immortality of Maurice Greene and Carl Lewis?

To do that, he needs to win either world or Olympic gold in the next two years.

So far in his career, Montgomery - or Fly-Mo, as the wags have nicknamed him - has enjoyed moments of brilliance, but has not shown the consistency of Greene at his peak.

If everything goes right, he is quick enough to see off the challenge of Greene and Chambers.

The raw speed has been there ever since he ran 9.96secs as a 19-year-old, only to be denied a world junior record because the track in Odessa, Texas, was 3.7cm too short.

But he needs to reproduce it every time he steps on the track. The world number one needs an air of invulnerability about him, and Montgomery does not yet have that.

In Paris he had it all - a following wind bang on the legal limit of two metres a second, and a reaction time to the starter's gun which was just 0.004secs off total perfection.

Can he now claim the big wins when it really matters?

Maurice Greene

This has been a nightmarish season for the world and Olympic champion.

If the steady stream of defeats to his arch-rivals were not bad enough, he has now lost his crown as the fastest man ever to run the earth.

Will the sun shine again on Greene?

In public Greene is as cocksure and confident as ever.

"I knew when I broke the record it wouldn't last forever, but it belongs to me," he says.

"It will come home. My coach thinks I can run 9.6-something. We'll have to see."

Deep down, Greene - once the Kansas Cannonball, now cruelly dubbed Slo-Mo - must fear that his era of dominance has come to an end.

There is a theory that great athletes have three or four years when they are almost unbeatable.

After that they can still win, but only if other athletes fail to perform to their potential.

Greene came to prominence when he won gold at the 1997 Worlds. He retained that title in 1999 and 2001 and took Olympic gold in 2000.

This year he says he began training late because of bereavements in his family and a dispute with his shoe sponsors.

But the defeats have been so out of character and so regular that many think he will struggle to ever reassert the old order.

Dwain Chambers

A mark of how far Dwain Chambers has come is that his first emotion on equalling Linford Christie's British and European record was one of disappointment that he had been beaten by Montgomery.

Chambers shows his disappointment in Paris

This season he has knocked a huge tenth of a second off his previous personal best.

More importantly, he won his first major title at the Europeans and began to consistently run the sort of times that beat world-class fields.

Chambers beat Greene five times and edged Montgomery almost as often.

The work he did in San Francisco last winter with coach Mike McFarlane and Remi Korchemny has finally began to turn his vast potential into serious wins.

At 24 years old, he has three years on the new world record holder.

And the pain he felt at the weekend - what he referred to afterwards as "the trauma of being in a world record race", will not last for too long.

There is certainly more to come - and the 2003 Worlds could be the place where it happens.

Mark Lewis-Francis

Greene himself has tipped Lewis-Francis as the man to dominate the 100m in years to come.

Will Lewis-Francis come back stronger in 2003?

He might look back on this season with a feeling of 'what if?', but the disaster of the Commonwealth 100m final will soon fade into the memory.

More importantly, Lewis-Francis continued his rise through the sprinting ranks and will come back faster next year.

Having turned 20 earlier this month, and until now having limited his training to three days a week, he cannot fail to get stronger.

And with the World Indoors in March in his home town of Birmingham, the stage is set for an early illustration of that.