Due to the discovery of renormalon cancelation, understanding of the
heavy quark mass and interquark force was improved drastically around 1998.
I overview what was understood then and theoretical progress that took
place after it.
We show how to extract genuine UV part of the leading Wilson coefficient
in OPE of the static QCD potential and how it improves the theory
prediction in the range r*Lambda_QCD < 0.8 with regard to lattice
computations.