Two double world champions will line up for the USA in Glasgow this month, and will surely receive greater acclaim than they are accorded in their own country. Bernard Lagat and Brad Walker are part of a small group upon whose shoulders the future of athletics in America rests.

Lagat captured 1500 and 5000 metres gold at the World Championships in Osaka, the first man to win both titles, but, Kenyan-born, he's hardly your all-American boy no matter how firmly he wraps himself in Old Glory. Walker is world pole vault champion indoors and out, 12th member of the elite 6.00-metre club. Yet, compared to the profile enjoyed by his Russian counterpart, the female indoor and outdoor champion Yelena Isinbayeva, Walker is almost anonymous.

Both are in the US squad to face Britain, Sweden, Germany, and a Commonwealth Select at the Kelvin Hall on January 26 in the Norwich Union International. Lagat, who formerly represented Kenya, made his first indoor appearance for the US in Glasgow a year ago, and returns to contest the shorter distance.

It is the launch of Olympic season, but for the United States it is very much more than that.

With the demise of drug cheat Marion Jones, US track and field is struggling to find credible new heroes. Managers and agents are vying to make Allyson Felix or Sanya Richards the poster girl of their sport.

With the doping downfall of the former world 100m record-holder Tim Montgomery and the world and Olympic champion Justin Gatlin, there is still no credible male standard bearer to replace 200m and 400m world record-holder Michael Johnson. His direct 400m successor is another Texan: the Olympic and world champion Jeremy Wariner. But he has had bypass surgery, charisma bypass, that is.

Provided he maintains a clean image, America's strongest male hope is Tyson Gay, the only other double individual champion in Osaka (100 and 200m), but Gay's rights to the crown will remain overshadowed until he can dethrone Asafa Powell as world 100m record-holder.

On the female side, Richards has glamour and an outgoing personality. She'd love to be that girl, but the US lauds only winners. Though Richards broke the 22-year-old American 400m record in 2006, was unbeaten in 13 races at the distance, and was crowned world athlete of the year, she was a mere bit player last summer. She could not even qualify for the 400m in Japan and, though she made it in the 200m, she was beaten out of sight by Felix.

The diminutive and more demure Felix was a teenager when she became the youngest winner of a world sprint title in 2005. She is the daughter of a preacher who reminds her that her gift is from God. The notion of being the pin-up to front US track and field seems to sit uneasily. But she is petite, pretty, prodigiously-talented, and articulate and modest with it. Those seeking to pick something positive from the bones of the Jones era have someone worthy to work with, a refreshing alternative to Marion's carrion.

The ante is raised in Olympic year. Not just because the big O pokes its head above a US horizon beyond which a parochially myopic nation rarely looks, but because there are millions to be made for the American face of the Games.

Pole vaulter Walker was the world silver medallist in 2005, won world indoor gold in 2006, and cleared 6.00 metres that summer. Outdoor gold in Japan was the first by an American vaulter since the world event was inaugurated in 1983, and established him as the man to beat in Beijing.

Walker is used to living on the edge and confronting adversity. He has a taste for fast cars, skiing and snowboarding, but these are on hold while he concentrates on vaulting, which is dangerous enough. Warming up for the world indoor event in Moscow, he missed the foam pit, smashing his head. "The lights went out for a second; I had concussion," he recalled. Yet he continued, managed to qualify and, after a CT scan, won gold in the final.

When he won in Osaka he had not touched a pole or weights in a month, because of two bulging spinal discs. He had also been denied access to his coach. The Russian, Alex Parnov, is part of the Australian Institute of Sport coaching system, who warned him off advising Walker. "I was a little bummed out," acknowledged Walker. "I put that in the fire and used it as fuel." He also psyched himself up by dying his Mohican haircut a shade of purplish blue, with two lightning bolts etched down the left side.

Lagat lost a chunk of his career, first to a flawed dope test which kept him out of the Kenyan team for the 2003 World Championships in Paris, and then while he waited for US citizenship. He was cleared of any doping violation, but received no compensation. "That will always be with me," he told me in Osaka, yet he had no recriminations.

Significantly, though, he said: "These two golds were for America. I was born in Kenya, but I'm American now." He has an American wife and has studied and lived in the US for a decade. He believes he can do the same double in Beijing, but has yet to confirm whether he will attempt it.