FINAL INSULT
Boos ring out as Bolt beaten into third in his farewell race by twice banned drugs cheat Gatlin
A TERRIBLE silence met the end of the men’s 100m final in the London Stadium last night. Not only was Usain Bolt, the great hero of the sport, denied victory in his final individual race but it was won by two time drugs cheat Justin Gatlin. Athletics’ worst nightmare had just unfolded in front of a watching world.
The fans who had packed into the stadium to savour every last moment of this race, hoping for one last signature Bolt moment of celebration, one final flourish, one last waltz, watched in stunned amazement as Gatlin dipped for the line a fraction of a second ahead. Bolt was third, beaten to the silver medal by the young American Christian Coleman.
In the shocked aftermath of the race, everyone seemed to try to pretend that Bolt had won. Gatlin was booed and it was Bolt who was interviewed trackside and told that the whole stadium loved him. Two years ago, it was said that Bolt had saved the sport when he beat Gatlin at the World Championships. So what must the sport think now?
The crowed kept being told that Bolt was the saviour of the sport but this was the worst possible outcome for a saviour. Not just to be beaten in a major final for the first time in 10 years but to lose to Gatlin, the American who symbolises everything that is wrong with it.
Bolt had been beaten in the third 100m semi-final of the evening a couple of hours earlier, losing to Coleman by one hundredth of a second after another poor start.
It was the first time he had been beaten for four years and the first time he had ever been beaten in the semi-finals of a major championships but no one really believed the result would be repeated in the final.
This was the moment athletics has been dreading. Not because Bolt lost but because it was the moment when the sport can no longer shelter beneath his wings, the moment when the camouflage of the greatest showman it has ever had, is taken away and the sport has to be judged without him.
For all the reforming efforts of Lord Coe, athletics is still not a pretty sight. Events last night were speckled with competitors called ‘authorised neutrals’, innocent refugees from Russia’s statesponsored doping programme that has led to the country’s ongoing suspension.
The label makes them sound like extras from Blade Runner. The crowd here also witnessed another absurdly dominant run by Olympic women’s 10,000m gold medallist Almaz Ayana. It was met with a strange mixture of giddy awe, disbelief and downright cynicism. This is athletics’ cursed hinterland, a place where even Bolt’s greatness cannot reach.
Colin Jackson pointed out last week that athletics existed before Bolt. Well, yes, but it was not morally bankrupt in the minds of the public before Bolt. It is now. Bolt was all that stood between athletics and the abyss.
This is the record that we look back on now: eight gold medals at the Olympic Games in Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro, 11 World Championship golds and world records in the 100m and 200m that look as though they will take a long time to be beaten.
When he burst into the world’s wider consciousness before those Beijing Olympics, the ebullience of his character was a glorious contrast to the orchestrated order of those Games in the beautiful Bird’s Nest. And in the next nine years, his star shone more and more brightly. So after all that, out of the smoking ruins of athletics, Bolt has emerged to attain a status granted only to a very few in the history of sport. He has earned the kind of adulation only bestowed on those who achieve greatness with style, grace and charisma.
His breathtaking list of achievements combined with his personal dynamism means he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Pele and Roger Federer.
What separates them is that the others had rivalries to define their greatness. Bolt has been a one-man band. For him, there has been no Joe Frazier, no Bobby Moore and no Rafael Nadal. In athletics, there is only Bolt, then there is the void.
Bolt’s importance to the sport in the last decade is all but impossible to overstate. One of the most charismatic athletes the world has ever seen, he has reigned at a time
when athletics has been brought to its knees by a long series of doping controversies.
Its past sins still haunt its present. A few minutes before Bolt’s semifinal last night, Britain’s Jo Pavey took to a podium here in the Olympic Stadium to be presented with a bronze medal from a World Championships women’s 10,000m that took place 10 years ago.
Pavey was upgraded from fourth to third after Turkey’s Elvan Abeylegesse, who originally won silver in the Osaka championships, was found guilty of an in-competition doping offence. Kara Goucher, who has made allegations against Mo Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar, was moved up from bronze to silver.
The two women shared a hug on the podium and the modern-day IAAF, led by Lord Coe, deserves credit for honouring cheated athletes, but it underlines the reality that doping still lingers like a ghost around this sport.
In his years at the top, most of Bolt’s main rivals have been stripped away, not by age or injury, but by doping suspensions. Gatlin, who was booed by the crowd last night, Asafa Powell, Yohan Blake and Tyson Gay, all pretenders to his crown at one time or another, have been tainted by ignominy and shame.
Athletics is a land of scorched earth and Bolt has hurtled across it in a yellow and green blur, an icon of brightness in a desert of doping. Of the 30 fastest 100m times ever, only nine were achieved by a clean athlete — and all were run by Bolt. In that climate, it is understandable that athletics has become trapped in an unhealthy inward-looking culture, where those who exhibit anything other than blind admiration for the two stars of these championships, Bolt and Farah, are treated not as people who want to help the sport but as pariahs.
So even though Salazar is under investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency over a raft of alleged doping violations — and there remain questions about Farah’s two missed drugs tests in the run up to the London Olympics — anyone who raises those issues becomes a non-person.
This era of athletics loves nothing better than shooting the messenger. Even yesterday, a British Athletics official made a huge drama out of a Farah press briefing because of fears it might be infiltrated by a journalist who would ask Farah inconvenient questions.
For all the awe that greeted Farah’s victory in the 10,000m here on Friday night, there are equal measures of paranoia emanating from Farah and his entourage. There remain legitimate questions to be asked of him and he has chosen to avoid answering them.
That is the world that Bolt has presided over with such majesty, a world of suspicion and doubt and fear and loathing, a world where no one quite knows whether to believe if what they are seeing is real.
It is perhaps the greatest of Bolt’s triumphs that he dominated his events so completely and still rose above the suspicion that cloaks the rest of his sport. He has been a light in the darkness but, with his final solo race run, the light has gone.