USAIN Bolt’s staggering triumph in the men’s 100m at the Olympics on Saturday, smashing the world record and winding down his run before he was even finished, will play again and again on our television screens and in our memories, so great was the joyous insouciance of his performance
So total was the young Jamaican’s domination of his rivals that spectators across the world are bound to view his achievement with cynicism (as indeed they will Michael Phelps’ phenomenal domination of the pool last week). In a Games that has seen fake fans, fake singers and fake fireworks, questions will be asked as to whether the most eye-catching results are also artificially enhanced.
Such cynicism is sadly understandable. Drugs have corroded confidence to the point where exceptional athletes, the very people the Olympics are intended to celebrate, now face the impossible task of proving a negative to put themselves beyond suspicion.
There can be no doubt of Bolt’s superlative talent since he emerged as a teenage sensation in 2001. His curse is to excel in a discipline that has been so stripped of credibility by his predecessors.
Bolt’s triumph comes 20 years after the most notorious doper of them all, Ben Johnson, produced an equally devastating performance in Seoul only to be revealed as a cheat within days. Linford Christie, the 1992 champion, tested positive for steroids at the end of his career and Justin Gatlin, the man Bolt deposed as Olympic champion, was subsequently banned. Sydney’s sprint-double champion Marion Jones, meanwhile, is watching the Beijing Games from jail as a result of her association with the Balco laboratory, while the woman who should have inherited her Sydney Gold, Katerina Thanou, disgraced the Athens Olympics by missing a drug test together with Greece’s champion sprinter Constantinos Kenderis.
Yet if Bolt can leave Beijing with his head held high, he will have done much to erase the damage caused by this roll call of shame. For not only was he brilliant, he was having fun, a demeanour that would suggest the obsession with winning is not so great as to lure him down the doping abyss.
As his rivals were deep in concentration before the start, here was a young man pulling faces and clowning about as if he was messing around with his mates on a Sunday afternoon rather than performing for a global audience of billions on the world’s greatest sporting stage. Here was a sprinter so dominant that he could afford to slow down at the end to salute the crowd and still reel in a new world record.
Usain Bolt has blown a whirlwind of fresh air into athletics. The world has been dazzled by his performance and his attitude. Let us hope that admiration will not be shattered by scandal, and that we can look back on that performance as a turning point in a disgraced sport.
