The ManicaPost
For once Usain Bolt, despite providing the biggest draw for the crowds, did not produce the most incredible performance of the evening. That accolade went to South African 400 metres runner Wayde van Niekerk, who broke Michael Johnson’s world record right before Bolt entered the arena for the 100m final.
Bolt watched on a monitor on the warm-up track, his jaw dropping open. It was an expression of awe he is used to seeing on the faces of others when he runs.
He will have recognised it again after beating Justin Gatlin to win gold in 9.81sec. It was not his finest race, a slow start and a grimace halfway through – no time to look over his shoulder and smirk as he had during an easy, breezy semi-final run earlier in the evening – but it was never truly in doubt.
From his first gold medal in the 100m at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Bolt has now started 19 championship races in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay and won 18 of them. His only ‘loss’ was not even a defeat in the proper sense; he was disqualified for a false start at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu.
Bolt’s latest victory means his dream of leaving Rio with nine Olympic gold medals in total and an unprecedented ‘triple triple’ of sprint titles is very much on.
“I came to this Olympics to win three gold medals, to prove myself again as one of the greats,” he said.
“That was my focus. If, by any chance, I fail then of course I’m going to be sad and not feel accomplished.”
Bolt also has his sights set on breaking his own 200m world record of 19.19sec, and that did not seem impossible, given how comfortable his 9.86sec in the 100m semi-final looked. Bolt criticised the quick turnaround in the timetable for his event after the semis for failing to go quicker in the final, and welcomed the daylong break between the 200m semi-final and medal race.
“My legs kind of felt dead at the start,” he said. “I wasn’t pleased, I wasn’t happy they changed the schedule to an hour and 20 minutes, there is usually more than two hours between.
“I’m getting older, the athletes need time to recover. I wasn’t happy with the schedule and hopefully we’ll take it back to the normal schedule.”
Bolt’s unmatched marketability in athletics, as one of the sport’s only genuine crossover stars, lies in the fact he knows what to do to keep the fans interested, but also knows what to say.
He has challenged van Niekerk to a race over the rarely-run 300m. “That would be a good race,” he said. Michael Johnson holds the 300m world record, his 30.85sec eclipsing Bolt’s best of 30.97 and Van Niekerk’s 31.03.
Bolt added: “This year I was hoping that I was in good shape when my coach told me that they were going to put on a 300m. Hopefully next season, if he’s in good shape, we might get a chance to run.”
After watching Bolt’s victory, Johnson explained why the Jamaican is peerless. Johnson doubts whether, when Bolt retires after the London World Championships next year, we will see his like again.
“At the start, he’s with all the other athletes except for Gatlin,” he said. “Normally I’d expect someone at 6ft 6in to be behind everyone else at the start. So he doesn’t give up much at the very beginning of the race, and that’s his advantage. Simply put, he’s very quick for someone very tall – that’s not normal in terms of the history of this event.
We train athletes at Michael Johnson Performance in all sports, and after the 2008 Olympics we started getting calls from people saying: ‘I got a 6ft 6in sprinter’. But just because you’re 6ft 6in, it doesn’t mean you can sprint like Usain Bolt. He is unique – he’s in a unique position, he’s a unique individual.
“Those people come along every now and then, and there will be another one who’s unique in some other different way that calls into question what all of the historians of athletics and all of the sports scientists thought they knew. Then we have to start over again like Usain Bolt has made us do.”- Daily Mail.
