In Our Time
It’s an emotion under siege by our explanatory, know-all, internet age: Wonder, I mean. So much so that it seldom makes an appearance anymore: someone’s much too likely to jump up and explain why it’s inappropriate, the product of mere innocence, indeed, ignorance; if the wonderer had only considered the genetic (or climatic, or astrophysical) evidence, the feat/event would have shed its mystery, the outcome would be seen to have been predictable; and so on.
So, to begin with, let Wonder — plain, old-fashioned, religious-style Wonder — have its day in the sun. Once again, in Berlin last week, Usain Bolt went where no man has gone before, running the 100 in 9.58 and the 200 in 19.19. Let Wonder spread its joyous, incredulous wings.
Maurice Greene: “‘The Earth stopped for a second, and he went to Mars.”
Guy Ontanon (French sprint coach): “It’s monstrous to do what he did in [the 100] despite that error” [coming upright too soon after the start and in consequence running the first 20 metres 2 1/2 kph slower than he did in Beijing].
Ato Boldon (Trinidadian Olympic sprint medalist, now an NBC commentator): “We have to rethink everything we know about human performance. I used to talk about times in the area of 9-low as some kind of unicorn-like fantasy, but he has made fantasy into reality.”
Michael Johnson (until Bolt, acclaimed the greatest sprinter of all time, and the greatest exponent of running a curve, speaking of Bolt’s 200 performance last week): “A ridiculous race. The bend is unbelievable. No one has ever run a bend like this and probably never will.”
Ratifying Johnson’s disbelief was the clock, which timed Bolt at a staggering tenth of a second ahead of the field after the first 50 metres, run entirely on the bend. In fact, turning for home Bolt was going so fast that centrifugal forces nearly swung him out into the lane of the runner outside of him and he had to cut back in.
(Regarding those centrifugal forces, the NYT’s Christopher Clarey may have provided a further insight when he noted that Bolt’s minor car accident in Jamaica in April “left him with an injured left foot after he stepped on thorns when he stepped out of his vehicle into a ditch [and] unable to train normally for the 200 because of the curve’s effect on his foot.”)
And finally, from contributors to Tom Fordyce’s BBC blog:
“Still in a fog of disbelief.”
“I feel like Paul on the road to Damascus.”
In Bolt’s Berlin performances, there were all manner of markers which Wonder could and did cite as the matrix from which it had bloomed.
Fordyce: “When Bolt ran 9.69 secs last summer in Beijing, even that seemed an impossible time. To take another 11 hundredths of a second off that defies logic, history and everyone else’s biology. The world record has never before been broken by a margin that big… Five men have never before run under 9.93 seconds in the same race. The greatest 100m in history? Surely.”
That was written before the 200, of course. But look how minimally — and with what wondrous symmetry — Fordyce would have had to amend it had he been writing about the 200, four days later! Only change 9.69 to 19.30, 9.93 to 20, and 100 to 200: and the paragraph stands!
And then there was Tyson Gay, surely the most wretched man on earth — who can blame him for shaking his head and withdrawing from the 200? To be the greatest sprinter the world has ever seen — bar Bolt! To have run faster than any man has ever run — bar Bolt! To have run, in the 60-to-80 metres stretch of the 100, every bit as fast as Bolt when (as the splits-clock showed) Bolt was running at his fastest, touching 28 mph at one point — and still to be relegated to a footnote in athletics’ history, one of a supporting cast giving brief interviews afterwards in the shadows, while, in the spotlight, the hero mimed some legendary Greek, or is it Roman, archer!
Poor, poor Tyson Gay. That part just wasn’t fair.
And, likewise, poor Kenenisa Bekele, the greatest long-distance track runner of all time, who in seven years has never lost at 10,000 metres; who holds the world record in the 5,000 and the 10,000; who has won 11 individual gold medals at the world cross-country championships; and who, like Bolt, pulled off a spectacular double in Beijing, winning both the 5,000 and the 10,000, and, like Bolt, may have done so again by the time you read this. “What more can I do?” asked Bekele last Wednesday.
And the answer is, of course, nothing. If not quite ‘in the shadows’ like Gay, the greatest long-distance runner of all time, Bekele, that effortless glider, must nonetheless signal from stage left for our attention, while, in the spotlight, Bolt, having just hand-mimed a jet taking off, Whoosh!, quits the clowning and drops onto one knee (‘On your marks!’), and lets his head, too, drop, the persona of the clown vanishing like the spectre it always was, and all of reality concentrates, and Wonder waits… Poor Bekele! He, too, deserved better.
A blogger calling himself ‘bonheur2b’ deserves quoting, for his nice distinctions concerning the character of the Jamaican kid. (He’s just turned 23!) Writes bonheur2b: “Quite apart from his blessed [sic!] sprinting ability, what’s most amazing about Bolt is how he maintains the same personality he has always had. Yes, [a] bit cocky and confident, but not arrogant and conceited. Humble and happy and, most of all, clearly someone having fun. And believe [me], as a lifelong follower of athletics, athletics has NOT been fun for a long, long time. Thank you, Usain; and long may you continue to smile for us all!”
(Talking about smiling, hear the joke. In Beijing the IAAF president, whose name we rightly forget, tried to rain on Bolt’s parade, scolding him for “disrespecting” the other athletes with his chest-beating post-race exultation. Then watch how, a year later, to the contrary, the current IAAF president tried to get in on the action, taking the unprecedented step of sitting with the 100-meter medalists at a news conference last Sunday. Only, no one acknowledged his presence! No one asked him any questions!)
But we are almost out of space, and I see I haven’t expressed the meaning, the man, implicit in this column’s title. Usain Bolt is a serious young man, one who, away from the spotlight, ‘works hard,’ as he would say, training both hard and scientifically. (Let no one scant the self-imposed suffering a great athlete puts himself through: those reps! And in particular, that last rep, when everything is hurting, and groaning inwardly he runs against the hurt, pushing his aching body, bursting his burning lungs…!)
And Usain Bolt also has an intimate sense of history, and knows himself to be in the great tradition of Jesse Owens; of “Jesse,” as he called him last week (“Jesse made history here”), with a familiarity that was both genuine and earned, and, the opposite of contempt, signalled his inner membership in a small band of brothers: those happy few anointed with the sacred task of carrying the torch of human potential in their time…
Amid the clowing, and the Wonder that irresistibly follows it (‘On your marks!’), let us not forget that Usain: the real Usain.