Bolt — The greatest Champion of All

The roar was not the same. This time around the cacophony of Super Saturday had a sadder, even an angrier note.

Five years on from securing his legend at the 2012 Olympics, Usain Bolt had hoped to bow out of the sport he has for so long electrified, with one last trademark burst of unanswerable speed and joy. In the event, his last act as a solo athlete was to take a bronze medal behind his long-time rival, the American Justin Gatlin.

Few athletes know more about time than Bolt. Having chased it down and exploded it into unlikely tenths and hundredths for more than a decade, it finally caught up with him. His sweatshirt coming into the stadium before this final 100m race of a peerless career bore the motto “forever faster”, but his eyes and his manner told a slightly different story. He went through the motions of his prerace hype routine, striking the poses, but his heart wasn’t quite in it.

No doubt, in some ways, he had seen this final defeat coming: it was the one attitude – gracious loser – he had never had to display, but he performed it with just as much aplomb as all the others. Bolt had come to the London World Championships having only once run under 10 seconds this year, and nursing another round of back problems that had necessitated a visit to the German doctor Hans Müller-Wohlfahrt in Munich.

Qualifying was shaky in the first round on Friday when he tugged at his prophet’s beard and complained about the starting blocks being “the worst he had ever seen”. His semi-final, earlier in the evening, saw him beaten for the first time at that stage in a major championship since his golden run began in 2008. Even so, the feeling around the stadium, and the world, was that he would have enough for one last hurrah.

One of the many things that Bolt has brought to this shortest of all sporting dramas is a sense of unfolding narrative. Because of his size, he has routinely started behind his competitors, and then inexorably reeled them in, running 41 giant strides to their 45 or 46.

What used to happen at 50 metres, however, this time didn’t quite happen at 95. For the first time, as he neared the line, the strain showed on his face: he looked like all the others. But the grimace was quickly replaced by a broad grin of gratitude and relief.

Bolt said farewell to Jamaica, where it all started, in June, but it was fitting that he should end the greatest solo athletic career on this particular back straight. London 2012 wasn’t his first Olympic triumph: that came in Beijing. It wasn’t the scene of his most extraordinary feat: that was the “triple double” gold in Rio. But it was the place where his legend was most memorably forged. In that most joyous of Olympics, I was lucky enough to be at the end of the home straight for much of the fortnight; nothing took the breath away quite like Bolt making good on his boasts.

Even then his career was not so much about breaking records as about proving himself the consummate competitor: did anyone really have the nerve, the confidence, the hubris to run past him, the greatest ever? It is eight years since Bolt ran his historic 9.58-second world record in Berlin; he has spent those years losing hundredths of a second, waiting for the rest to catch up. Perhaps inevitably it was Gatlin, 35 years old, the haunted pantomime villain to his prince charming, who emerged to deliver the farewell coup de grace.

Ever since Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic champion, returned to the sport after his second doping ban in 2010, he has played a shadowy Moriarty to Bolt’s effortless Holmes. The more fans have cheered Bolt, running clean, the more they have heckled Gatlin, for having run dirty. — The Guardian