Usain Bolt’s triumphs in Beijing can all be viewed in less than a minute. After several years of near-misses because of injuries and inexperience, he needed slightly less than forty seconds to show he could outrun the world’s other fastest men, by embarrassing margins, in any conditions the gods of athletics decided to impose. Last but one out of the blocks in the final of the 100m, his giant stride took him past the rest of the field so comfortably during the middle portion of the race that the last seven of his 41 steps could be spent looking for Asafa Powell on his right flank and then celebrating in his inimitable style. By the time the mortals in the field had taken the three or four extra strides they needed to reach the tape, Bolt had extended his arms, turned his palms up and then down, and pounded his chest while cantering through with an untied shoe lace to a new world record. Two-tenths of a second after Bolt had crossed the finish line, Richard Thompson of Trinidad and Tobago leaped into the air, justifiably happy to have finished only a body-length behind all of this “showboating.” (Wouldn’t an American athlete in similar circumstances have been lauded for his exuberance?)
In the 200m finals Bolt ran into a headwind of almost one metre per second to break what many thought was an unbreakable world-record. When Michael Johnson set the new record in 1996 it had stood for seventeen years, and he himself never came close to his record-setting time again. One measure of Bolt’s achievement in these games is Johnson’s belief that he will take the record even lower and set a mark that can only be bettered by similarly prodigious athlete running a perfect race under optimal conditions.
The 4×100 relay was satisfying for different reasons. Another sprint event traditionally dominated by American athletes, it allowed the Jamaicans to offset a costly error in the women’s relay finals – one that almost certainly denied them a clean sweep of all the sprints at this Olympics. Bolt’s contribution to this race allowed Asafa Powell to earn a well-deserved gold medal and it served notice to the world of athletics that now that the international playing field has been levelled by strict anti-doping measures West Indian athletes trained in the West Indies can compete with anyone in the world. (Athletes like Hasely Crawford, Don Quarrie, Ato Boldon and Obadele Thompson, of course, were also world-beaters but it is worth noting that although Ben Johnson, Donovan Bailey and Linford Christie are all Jamaican-born, Bolt was the first Jamaican to win the 100m finals under a Jamaican flag.)
Even with all of this under his belt, much more is expected from Bolt in the near future. The Gleaner reports that he appeared set to run 9.52 seconds in the 100m finals before he eased up, and although his performances at Beijing might suggest otherwise, few insiders believe that Bolt has yet peaked. Many knowledgeable observers expect several more records from him before the London Olympics in 2012. Some even argue that – given his height and abnormally long stride – the 400m may yet turn out to be his best distance.
For many West Indians, however, Bolt’s achievement will never be measured by stopwatches or medal counts. We will remember him as the man who took an over-serious sport and reinvented it as entertainment: mugging for the cameras before the race, shooting imaginary arrows into the crowd and pointing a respectful finger to the heavens before nestling into the blocks. Playfully confident before his races, he has always been charmingly modest and understated after them, even while celebrating in an unselfconsciously Jamaican fashion (who else would have dared improvise his comical dancehall moves?).
Vivian Richards dominated cricket in a similar way and he set a standard that perhaps only Brian Lara has been able to match since. Richards (and other icons like Headley and Sobers) left the stamp of his character on cricket long after his career ended and some of his records had been broken. Like him, Usain Bolt has introduced his contemporaries to a West Indian élan hardly known outside of the Caribbean, a sense of joyful mastery that has all but disappeared from the world of professional sport. In a minute of remarkable speed, carefully distributed in the right places and at all the right times, he has catapulted himself into the pantheon of West Indian sports heroes, and we should all stand a little taller for his being there.
