When great athletes peak, there is an aura of invincibility about them. He or she just can’t be beaten, especially at a big stage. They dominate the game for years, but then gradually the losses mount until, if they are smart, they retire before becoming just another ordinary player in a game. Over the past year or two, Usain Bolt looked to be on the verge of skidding down that precipice. And he still might be because he has announced his retirement in 2017. But the question became a little more open-ended when he pulled off yet another 100 metres trophy at an amazing win at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships of athletics.
If it were a Hollywood movie, the win would certainly have been a race that Justin Gatlin should have won because there is more drama to it. Gatlin is 33 and that is a practically old age in athletics. He is also a man who had set a world record in his younger days but had it taken away after he was found guilty of taking performance-enhancing drugs. He was banned for four years. From such ignominy, he made a remarkable comeback in the autumn of his running life by winning every race for the last two years. The World Championship would have been the climax of that comeback. And it turned out to be the closest of races, Gatlin leading most of the time, until Bolt, never the best off the block, got into his stride and, at the end, even while looking sideways at Gatlin pushed himself ahead just enough to win the race by a whisker of 0.01 seconds.
If past record is a promise of future performance—unlike mutual funds, that does sometime come true in athletics— no one was too surprised by Bolt’s win. For the past seven or eight years, he has been the fastest man on earth whose only chink in the armour is his own casual attitude. Almost as if he picks and chooses when he would break a record. When he first won an Olympic gold medal in 2008, it was with a time of 9.69 seconds and the runner-up was 9.89 seconds—0.2 might not be a lot on our watches, but such a difference in an Olympics 100 metres final is a yawning gulf. But what really astonished everyone was that Bolt could have run faster. What he did do, however, was towards the end. When he was certain of victory, he threw the drill of how to end a race to the winds, decided he didn’t need to work his hands and brought them to the sides in a gesture of triumph even as he sped past the line. Champions before him in other sports have also decided when to break records at will. Sergey Bubka used to break the world record for the pole vault centimetre by centimetre, because the then Soviet Union had a policy of a reward each time a new record was set. But to do it in the crunch of a 100 metre dash, which takes everything that an athlete has, is simply unheard of.
The next year, at the World Championships, Bolt brought his 100 metres time to 9.58, the only person to have broken the 9.6 mark. He also holds the world record for 200 metres at 19.19 seconds. The man with the 100 metres record is assumed to be the fastest man in the world. But Bolt came late to the 100 metres race and that too after his coach informed him that this was not his format because, among other things, his start was not good enough. That is true even now, but he seems to be making up for it easily enough.
As a child, Bolt dreamt of becoming e a cricketer, and given the state of the game in the West Indies, it was probably just as well that noticing the speed with which he ran to bowl, he was pushed on to track-and-field. Otherwise, you might have been seeing him at the IPL, a bit player in a bit sport played by a handful of countries.
About The Author
More Columns
Travellers on Trial Bhavya Dore
Sahir’s Legacy Kaveree Bamzai
The Devi Mystique Bibek Debroy