Unique Usain will reign again

USAIN Bolt’s success relies on three things. Take one out and his career would not be what it is.

One, he was fortunate to be blessed with a tremendous talent. All Olympians have superior talent compared to normal people. But Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis and Bolt have natural talent even superior to that. Unique talent.

It then takes a lot of hard and smart work and that is central to success. But you can be working hard and not necessarily be improving. So you need to be clever about what you do. That is about knowing what is good for you as an individual. It means you don’t just follow a template and do what every great 100m and 200m runner before you did. It takes a lot of research, a lot of trial and error, some very careful decision-making.

The third thing is most important — knowing yourself as an athlete. What sort of mindset do you need to be in every day to get the best out of training. What sort of environment do you need? What is your pre-race routine? Usain knows absolutely what he has to do to be at his best.

Technically, Bolt has changed a few things, made his running a bit cleaner.

At this point in his career it is too late to change his technique dramatically. He is a bit all over the place and inefficient in terms of the way he sprints — though not as much as when he started out. If you watched him from the frontal plane there was a lot of wasted motion, a lot of side-to-side. But it is too late now to make major biomechanical adjustments. Because he is so much the world’s best, he’ll be good enough to win the gold.