Can struggling Usain Bolt find a way to slay the ‘Beast’ in the next 30 days?

 
p69 bolt
5 July 2012

Usain Bolt has precisely one month. On Sunday August 5 he will hunker down on the starting line of the 100m final in the Olympic Stadium at Stratford, preparing to make history.

If he crosses the line first, he will become the only man (other than Carl Lewis, in the dirty race of ’88) to retain an Olympic 100m title. If Bolt breaks his own world record of 9.58sec, as most of the watching world wishes him to, he will become the greatest, as well as the fastest sprinter in history.

There is, however, a problem. It goes by the name of Yohan Blake. Bolt’s 22-year-old training partner at the Racers Track Club in Jamaica has brilliantly timed his dash to pre-eminence. Ever since Bolt torched the record books in both the 100m and 200m finals at the Beijing Games in 2008, it has been assumed that he would repeat the show at London 2012. But Blake has other ideas.

At the Jamaican national trials last weekend, Blake twice left Bolt in his slipstream. He strolled through the 100m final, 0.11sec ahead of Bolt with a time of 9.75sec — making him the fourth-fastest man in history — then surged to the line in 19.80sec to win the 200m by three-hundredths of a second. The Bolt of 2008-09 was nowhere to be seen. The Blake of 2012 looked terrific.

Bolt and Blake could scarcely be more different. The Olympic champion is all limbs and languor. He runs like an ostrich, or an animated willow tree. Even after four years’ ubiquity on advertising boards and magazine covers, it is hard to comprehend that this gangly, good-humoured idler is by some stretch the fastest human being ever measured.

Blake, the world champion after victory in Daegu, where Bolt was disqualified, is a classic sprinter.

Square-shouldered and compact, he moves like a meteor, rather than a comet. He is known as The Beast, a nickname he welcomes since it speaks to his monstrous appetite for training. He is the coming man now, just as Bolt was in 2008.

There is a very real chance that in London, rather than watching Bolt break the 9.40sec barrier in the 100m and revise his 19.19sec world 200m record, we will see Blake rampaging through the field, announcing himself as the new superstar and swiping four lucrative years of broadband ads and fizzy-drink sponsorships.

Glen Mills, Bolt and Blake’s trainer, has made light of the older man’s struggles with his faulty start, his rhythm, his strength and his fitness. And of course, with Bolt, all things are relative. He has been beaten just twice over 100m in the last two years and has run 9.76sec this year — superb by just about anyone’s standards but his. Nevertheless, a month isn’t long to recalibrate a sprinter who hasn’t seen his peerless best since 2009.

Bolt’s engine is puttering. Blake is heading to London young, confident and on a winning streak.

Where does all this leave the 100m? Anyone wanting a sub-9.40sec Beijing-redux freak show may be disappointed. On the other hand, the sprinters who line up on August 5 may well comprise the fastest group of men ever assembled. Besides Blake and Bolt, there is Asafa Powell — one of those brilliant athletes born to the wrong age.

Powell is a great Jamaican sprinter in a time of unbelievable Jamaican sprinters — demonstrated at the national trials when 9.88sec was only good enough for third place.

That race must have reminded Powell of the 9.84sec he ran in Berlin in 2009, which was only enough to earn him bronze behind Bolt and Tyson Gay (who then broke the US record with a run of 9.71sec and still only took silver). Gay will surely be on the line in London too, and it is incredible to think that, in all likelihood, at least one of these two tremendous sprinters will come home from their last Olympic Games without a medal.

Chuck in Justin Gatlin, who won the US trials in 9.80sec last month and — well, let’s give Europe a vague interest at least — Christian Lemaitre, and it’s possible that this could be the closest final ever run.

That, in some ways, is more exciting than a 2008-style cakewalk.

It’s tiki tacky from ‘Eeyore’ the bore

On Sunday, Spain beat Italy 4-0 to win Euro 2012 and confirm that um, no, they aren’t boring. One man, however, remains very boring: commentator Mark Lawrenson, the BBC’s sour-mouthed mother hen who inexplicably spent the whole terrific match clucking and whining like he had an egg stuck up his tail. Much more enjoyable was the gloriously freeform, uninformed but excitable CBBC presenters’ commentary on the red button. One of the kids presenters called Lawro ‘Eeyore’. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Empty feeling of leaving out Becks

Stuart Pearce’s decision to leave David Beckham out of his Olympic football squad feels more churlish every day. Every time Pearce talks about it he gives the impression of a man with as much emotional intelligence as a paving slab. At the time of writing it was still possible to book a block of 30 tickets to watch Team GB play Uruguay in their final group game at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on August 1. Say what you like about Beckham; he’d have helped move some of those.

Henson signing is asking for trouble

Congratulations to London Welsh for winning their legal challenge for promotion to rugby union’s Premiership. Can they really want to celebrate by signing Gavin Henson? “[We are] in the market for players of proven quality and Henson has proved himself to be that time and time again,” said club MD John Taylor. Well, that’s one way of describing a proven troublemaker with a chronic injury history. Even with Henson’s former Ospreys coach Lyn Jones in charge at Welsh, Henson is a massive risk.

What a belting, urm sorry, belching effort

New sports are entering the Olympic fold all the time: BMX, trampolining, table tennis, etc. One that can’t be far away is burping. An interview with world burping champion Tim Janus was published this week. His advice for budding belchers? “12, 13 or 14 seconds is enough to crush the competition if you’re just doing backyard burping contests.” But approaching a title-standard 18.1sec belch means long, hard training. “It takes a lot of discipline to sit there and practise burp after burp.” What an athlete.

Twitter @dgjones

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in