Track and field: three great Olympians
“Mo Farah has joined the immortals,” said Oliver Brown in The Sunday Telegraph. Last Saturday, he became the second long-distance runner in history to secure a “double-double”, winning his second successive gold medals in the 5,000m and 10,000m. His “exquisitely judged” victory in the 5,000m followed “the conventional narrative of Farah dominance”: the cagey start, the surge to the front, “the signature last-lap pounce”. The 33-year-old is undoubtedly the “outstanding” long-distance runner of this era: he has now won nine successive titles at major championships – no one else has managed more than five in a row.
Farah has the ideal physique for endurance racing, said David Walsh in The Sunday Times: the long limbs and stride, the lightness on his feet. His bullishness is unrivalled, too: he believes he’s stronger and faster than any rival, and tries to intimidate them before a race. Yet there are some blemishes on Farah’s reputation. His coach, Alberto Salazar, is being investigated over allegations of doping. And he hasn’t come close to breaking the 5,000m and 10,000m world records. There can be no such reservations about Usain Bolt, said Chris Almeida on Theringer.com. True, the 30-year-old Jamaican sprinter is not as fast as he once was. But that hardly matters. Bolt hasn’t “raced against competitors in years”: since 2008, “he’s been chasing his own records”. In Rio, he capped his final Olympics with an unprecedented “triple-triple”: he won the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay for the third Games in a row. Such longevity would be amazing in any sport, let alone the sprints, “the razor edge of athletic competition”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. Bolt bowed out of the Olympics as the greatest ever track and field athlete, and the most compelling: no one else has made “being this good look so human”.
Those qualities have made him indispensable to athletics, said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. As the sport lurches from one doping crisis to another, Bolt has always been “the shining light”. He has nine of the 30 fastest 100m times in history; the remaining 21 were run by athletes who have failed a drugs test. When he retires next year, the sport will struggle desperately without him. If anyone can fill Bolt’s running shoes it’s Wayde van Niekerk, said Andrew Longmore in The Sunday Times. In Rio, the 24-year-old South African shaved an incredible 0.15 seconds off the 400m world record. Not bad for someone who weighed just over 1kg at birth, and was given only 24 hours to live. Off the track, however, van Niekerk is less exciting: coached by a 74-year-old great-grandmother, he is “a quietly spoken” man. He boasts “much of Bolt’s talent”, but “none of his showmanship”.