Bolt sprinting toward history
Jamaican track star confident he can produce another triple gold
Will there be anybody like Usain Bolt again? Not if you ask the man himself.
“I doubt it,” he replied, flashing that toothy, impish grin. “Nobody can be the next Usain Bolt.”
It was a relief, quite frankly, to see him in London at all for the Diamond League meet. Bolt had alarmed the world three weeks ago by pulling out of the Jamaican trials with a minor hamstring tear, an injury that threatened briefly to sabotage the poetry of his third and final Olympics. The thought seemed too dire to contemplate. No Bolt, no party. But he swaggered into his Tower Bridge hotel this week with an ebullience to suggest he had been playing us all along.
Not only did he claim he had “no worries” about the offending hamstring, he even made the bracing statement that he felt ready to break his own 200-metre world record in Rio.
Exasperated by arguments he was past his peak, Bolt suggested he could still defy all doubters by running faster than the 19.19 seconds he managed at the world championships in Berlin in 2009. “This is where history is going to be made,” he said. “I’m looking forward to putting on a show for the entire world to see.”
In its way, this was a vintage Bolt performance, complete with grandiose predictions, endearing selfregard, and even a less-than-subtle dig at his chief rival over 100 metres, Justin Gatlin. Bolt, who beat the American by 1/100th of a second at the world championships in Beijing last year, wasted no chance to crow at Gatlin’s expense as he prepared for another defining duel in Brazil.
Asked if he was psychologically the stronger of the two, Bolt replied: “I’m definitely tougher. Gatlin was just not ready, he was not used to being chased. He hadn’t had a tough competitor. Finally he did, with me.”
For an athlete already quantum shifts removed from his nearest competitors, Bolt has much to consider with Rio looming. He craves, perhaps deserves, the perfect ending, the cinematic bookend that would confirm him as the first person ever to win three successive Olympic 100-metre titles. Fail, and his compatriot Shelly-Ann FraserPryce, champion in the women’s 100 metres in Beijing and London, could beat him to it.
He remains desperate, too, for a “triple-triple” of Olympic sprint glory, an unprecedented feat that would satisfy the filmmakers in Brazil, who are following his every move for a future biopic. It is eloquent testimony to Bolt’s supreme status that while no other runner has taken gold over 100, 200 and the 4x100-metre relay at the same major championship more than once, he has done so five times.
“This is where I need to make a big mark,” he said. “I’ve had a slight setback, but I’m happy with the progress I’m making. I know, once the competition starts, that I’ll be ready.” So blinkered is Bolt this summer that he regards the spectre of Russian doping, illustrated by the absence of the country’s track and field stars from Rio, as a mere footnote.
“I don’t stress about these things,” he explained. “I always leave it up to the big heads to make the decision. For me it’s neither here nor there. It’s really a sideshow, and if you get caught up in it, you lose focus on the task at hand. So I don’t watch or keep a note.”
Lest this sounds a little louche or blasé on Bolt’s part, he did agree that the punishment of the Russians would serve as a powerful deterrent. As he stretched out his left arm to reveal a small adhesive bandage over the mark left by his latest drug test a day earlier, he lamented the “really bad” doping problem that has disfigured his sport.
Bolt has never failed a test, but the mistakes of others mean even he has not stayed immune to the fallout of the ever-proliferating drug scandal. In June, a re-examination of athletes’ B samples from the Beijing Olympics of 2008 found that Nesta Carter, Bolt’s former relay partner, had tested positive for traces of methylhexanamine, a banned stimulant.
While he could yet find himself stripped of the gold that he and Carter won together at the Bird’s Nest eight years ago, Bolt refused to despair. “It would be disappointing, but rules are rules,” he said with a shrug. “What can I do?”
The only solution, he recognizes, to soothe the anguish across athletics, is to offer a reminder in Rio of what he does better than anybody there has ever been.