London a fitting stage for Bolt’s fond farewell

Retirements of Jamaica’s track king and Farah will leave a huge void at the heart of the sport, so these championships are all the more special, writes Oliver Brown

To catch Usain Bolt in London is to witness fame at its most celestial. If we take an old acting analogy, he chews up the scenery. Entire evenings of track and field are sucked up into the swirling vortex of this one-man show.

When he won his second Olympic 100metres title here in 2012, the stroboscopic blaze of flashbulbs lit up the night like a meteor shower. “Who’s No1?” he yelled, staring down the lens. “Who’s still a legend? Who is it? Me. No1, every day, all day. Believe me.”

Nobody but Bolt can entertain that level of hubris and avoid reproach. It is not merely that he backs up his swagger with eye-popping performances, but that the grandstanding is of a piece with his infectious Jamaican party-boy act.

Once, he joked that he loved the anonymity of London, as an antidote to the hordes of admirers he would have to fend off in Asia. The summer of 2012 changed all that. Three gold medals later, he was pictured celebrating his efforts with half the Swedish women’s handball team.

As ever with Bolt, it is the unaffected charm that guarantees him devotion wherever he goes. Limbering up for his 200metres heat at the London Games, he won lusty cheers by giving his hat away to a teenage volunteer in his lane. There could be no more fitting stage, then, on which to take his bow as an athlete at these World Championships. For when it comes to Bolt and London, it is a reciprocal kind of love.

The next 10 days are likely to be remembered as a festival of farewells. Quite apart from Bolt making London 2017 his sign-off moment, en route to a long and languorous Caribbean retirement, Sir Mo Farah is also choosing the stadium that defined his body of work to streak off into the sunset.

Losing history’s finest sprinter and most consistent distance runner in just 10 days? It will create an incalculable emptiness for athletics, for its supporters and especially for Northern Irish agent Ricky Simms, who manages both men.

While Bolt enraptured London by producing the second-fastest 100metres in history, at 9.63 seconds – even if coach Glen Mills felt it could have been better – it was Farah whose bug-eyed bloody-mindedness formed perhaps the indelible image of those Olympics. The roar that heralded his second victory in the 5,000metres measured 140 decibels, louder than a superjumbo at take-off and enough to scramble the pictures taken by the finishline camera.

His look of manic terror on a final lap where he dipped under 53 seconds even spawned an internet meme, entitled: “Mo Farah running away from things.”

After the medal ceremony to confirm Farah as Britain’s greatest athlete, he clowned around with Bolt atop the podium, exchanging tributes. As Bolt shaped his hands into an ‘M’ shape above his head in emulation of his friend’s ‘Mo-bot’ routine, Farah obligingly performed the ‘Lightning Bolt’ gesture inspired by the Caribbean ‘To Di World’ dancehall move. They had become, in the space of a week, twin totems of the track.

At the time, Farah was deeply flattered to feature in the same photo-frame as Bolt, saying that he would need to break world records and win many more gold medals to be worthy of any comparison to the sprinter. The first part of that task has gone unfulfilled: Farah’s quickest time for 10,000metres ranks only 28th on the all-time list, while for 5,000metres he lies even farther back, with a personal best that stands a distant 178th. But by the measure of golds, he has surged into the stratosphere.

In Rio last summer, Farah joined Lasse Viren, Emil Zatopek and Kenenisa Bekele on the Mount Rushmore of distance immortals, completing the ‘double-double’ of back-to-back Olympic titles over 5,000 and 10,000metres. Only Viren, the ‘Flying Finn’, managed it before, in 1972 and 1976.

And yet where Viren’s longest dominant sequence of major championship golds was five, Farah is poised in London to extend his unbeaten run to a barely believable 11. Not since Ethiopia’s Ibrahim Jeilan ran him down on the home straight of the 10,000 in the Daegu World Championships, in 2011, has he been vanquished on the grandest stage.

It was Farah’s one significant global defeat under the tutelage of Alberto Salazar. Before his involvement with the US coach, long renowned for disciplinarian methods that would include cooling chambers and underwater treadmills, Farah was almost a makeweight in international terms, knocked out of the 5,000 metres even before the final at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. “Alberto said that I was weak,” he reflected. For all the ongoing controversy over Salazar’s unorthodox methods, a move to his training base in Oregon has yielded the richest harvest.

For five years, Farah, born in Somalia but first infused with a passion for athletics during his schooldays in Teddington, has faced the finest talents from Kenya’s Rift Valley and eclipsed them all.

This will not definitively be the last we see of Farah. His final engagement on a British track comes in Birmingham, on Aug 20, while he concludes his track career altogether at the Weltklasse in Zurich four days later.

From there, he is poised to sign for a series of highly lucrative marathon appearances as he switches to road racing. In some ways, it is the longest goodbye tour since Frank Sinatra’s.

For Bolt, however, there is no epilogue planned. Despite Justin Gatlin’s prediction that he could be tempted, à la Michael Phelps in swimming, to make a comeback, the man himself is adamant that his decision to step away is irrevocable. He turns 31 this month, and since 2012 his winning times have, however imperceptibly, been slowing.

He was down to 9.77 in Moscow by 2013, 9.79 in Beijing last year, and 9.80 in Rio last summer. In a race as hair-trigger as the

100 metres, Bolt recognises that his own gradual downward arc will soon intersect with the upward trajectory of his rivals. Better to depart now, he reasons, than to countenance the indignity of being deposed.

It is unlikely, health permitting, that he will be threatened in London. Canada’s gifted Andre de Grasse, Bolt’s main challenger, has withdrawn with a hamstring tear, while the ageing, twice-banned Gatlin looks a spent force and also has a habit of choking on the big occasion. After the next 40 seconds of running, spanning three rounds of the 100 metres and relay, Bolt will morph into an ex-athlete, most likely with his supremacy intact.

Even members of his inner sanctum seem unsure how he intends to fill his days from there. After all, athletics, unlike tennis or golf, is not a sport that the best can keep pursuing at leisure into their dotage.

“Track and field is the only sport where no one says, ‘You know what, let’s go out to the track for a run,’ ” he says. “I think I will be playing football most of the time.”

One could hardly begrudge him the luxury. Bolt has managed a decade as athletics’ one unadulterated good thing, a smiling, magnetic force of nature in times of acute strife for the sport.

The spectacle of London 2017 should be less a cause for sorrow that he is leaving than for a celebration of all that he has given.

‘I think I will be playing football most of the time when I’ve retired’