BOLT’S LAST STAND
How can athletics replace the great showman as he bids for one final shot at glory in London?
THE final husbanding of Usain Bolt’s extraordinary talent is taking place in Munich, on the track and in the clinic. Two of the father figures who have helped the Jamaican to unparalleled athletic success for the past decade, are there with him on the eve of his farewell appearance at the World Championships in London this week.
His coach Glen Mills, a wise, squat Pentecostal on whose deepvoiced pronouncements Bolt hangs, is deconstructing and retuning the technical minutiae of the 100 metres. And, Hans MullerWohlfahrt, the famous, effervescent German doctor, is patching up one of the most brittle and abused back-and-hamstrings mechanisms in the history of sport.
Should their expertise pay off, Bolt will get to the finish line first on Saturday, collect his 12th world gold medal, before a glorious sign-off in the 4x100m relay final a week later. Then he will be gone.
Just short of his 31st birthday, track and field’s biggest phenomenon will return to Kingston, Jamaica, to spend languid days in a long retirement. ‘At this point I have no idea what I will do when I stop,’ said Bolt. ‘But I always wanted to be able to have a lot more time to do charity work.
‘I have my football dream. I would like a trial to see if football makes any sense for me. But I always want to stay as close as possible to track and field. My coach says I should be an assistant coach at Racers Track Club in Kingston, and I will be part of that for sure.’
As Bolt spoke in Monaco after his final race before London, he was in reflective mood. He took on the air of an elder statesman. The usual joking of his press conferences had gone — recognition that a page is being turned, a chapter closing.
‘There is no better feeling than walking out and the fans seeing you for the first time, and me waving. It gives me goosebumps every time. Of course, I will miss it.
‘For a few years I think I’ll be fine — I’ll still be recognised by the crowds. I am still the one who has broken all the records. I am still the one who has won all the championship medals. It will never change, and that was my aim all my career. To be one of the best so that no one will ever forget.’
His sport will miss him, not least as a star propelled by chicken nuggets when too many of his rivals were drug-powered. He has stood for good against evil, most famously in the shape of America’s disgraced serial doper Justin Gatlin. Tyson Gay and Bolt’s Jamaican team-mate Asafa Powell also feature prominently on the crime sheet.
But more than anything we will remember Bolt for the chest-thumping glory of Beijing, the 9.69sec streak that imposed itself on the retinae of even the casual viewer.
Yet, nine years on, the slightest nagging melancholy impinges on that joyous mid-race celebration: for that was the moment the world record was truly at Bolt’s mercy to refashion at will.
Yes, he ran 9.58sec at the World Championships in Berlin a year later, but the fight for fitness — brought on by scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that caused his right leg to be half an inch shorter than his left — meant he could not hit the 9.4sec mark of his dreams in the early years of this decade. But, helped by Muller-Wohlfahrt, he repeatedly emerged at the end of seasons of fitness struggles in winning form for the big races. It has been some feat for a man who, by his own admission, never liked to work too hard.
This year is following a familiar trajectory: his time in Monaco was a technically proficient 9.95sec after 10.03sec and 10.06sec in his previous two outings.
This improvement has come against the backdrop of personal anguish, with the death in April of his friend Germaine Mason, Britain’s silver medal-winning high jumper at the Beijing Olympics. He was killed while riding his motorbike in Jamaica. Bolt was one of the first on the scene.
Norman Peart, who has helped to look after Bolt’s affairs since he was a junior, said: ‘Usain and Germaine got to know each other in 2002. They went away on vacations and to parties together. Germaine was his right-hand man. His death was a major blow but Usain never let it affect his training.’
As president of athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, Lord Coe has to prepare for the void Bolt will leave. But first he hands out bouquets to the man he considers the greatest. ‘I am a big boxing fan,’ said Coe, himself an athlete of legend. ‘I remember in the Seventies speaking to a journalistic colleagues of yours and discussing what on earth the sport would do when Muhammad Ali retired.
‘The reality is that you can’t replace Ali. It’s not that great boxers don’t come along. They do. Chavez, Hagler, Hearns, Leonard, Duran. The point relating directly to Bolt is not that it is unlikely we will get someone else who will win so many medals and get a sackful of world records; it is the
personality you are not going to replace. I was in Jamaica earlier this year for Usain’s final race on home soil. Our driver was in his 20s. I asked him about Usain. He said he could not remember a time when he wasn’t about. And the prime minister of Jamaica spoke to me about what he could do to build on everything Bolt means to sport and, frankly, beyond sport.
‘There is a healthy debate about who is the best middle-distance runner or endurance athlete. But, as a sprinter, Usain Bolt is incomparably the greatest. Carl Lewis was almost technical perfection and Jesse Owens set multiple world records in Michigan and Berlin in 1935 and 1936. But longevity clearly gives Bolt the edge with his back-to-back Olympic golds, his World Championships successes and world records in the 100m and 200m. He is out there on his own.’
A new generation line up, but for Bolt there is only the fine-tuning left to do. For us, one final glimpse of the clowning prince switching suddenly into a reverie of concentration on the blocks.
Then he will go back with nearly £30million in career earnings to the island where, as a country boy, he once played cricket in the streets with stumps cut from a banana tree.