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Kay Nietfeld/European Pressphoto AgencyJamaica's Usain Bolt ran the 100 in a world-record time of 9.58 seconds.
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By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
Published: August 17, 2009
BERLIN — The disparity between the length of the prologue in the 100 meters and the length of the main event is like nothing else in sports.
All that buzz, all that speculation, and in the age of Usain Bolt, all that preening. Then BANG! goes the starter’s gun and in less than 10 seconds, it is over and the epilogue — dancing and interviews — begins.
That is not much raw material to work with, and in the age of Bolt, raw material is even harder to come by. Bolt, a Jamaican, is taking huge bites out of the world record, as if someone has shortened the course or rewritten the rules.
In May 2008, when most of the planet had not yet heard of Bolt or seen his signature pose, the record was held by fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell, an impressive 9.74 seconds.
In little more than a year, Bolt has broken it three times, lopping 16-hundredths of a second off the total and saving the biggest cut for Sunday night, when he knocked 11-hundredths off his record time from the Beijing Olympics last summer. His full start-to-finish effort gave him a convincing victory over Tyson Gay of the United States.
Gay, the defending world champion, had to settle for a national record, 9.71 seconds — no small accomplishment considering he shares citizenship with Carl Lewis and Maurice Greene.
But Jamaica is the cradle of sprinting now, and all those curious to know just how fast Bolt might have gone if he had not stopped trying 20 meters before the finish in Beijing now have a much clearer answer. Assuming ratification, the time to beat is 9.58 seconds. And for now, only one man appears capable of playing this game.
It is not an optical illusion, at least as long as Bolt’s doping tests remain negative. At 6 feet 5 inches, he has a long, track-gobbling stride and a shorter man’s turnover rate. Bolt, who turns 23 Friday, is improving year to year, adding strength and cleaning up his once-raw technique. His season was disrupted by the demands of his Olympic-fueled celebrity and the effects of a minor car accident in Jamaica in April that left him with an injured left foot.
Unable to train normally for the curve of the 200 because of the foot injury, he was clearly still able to put in sufficient training for the 100. The bad news for his competition is that Bolt, according to some, ran a far-from-perfect race Sunday.
Yes, he sprinted through the finish line for a change, even if he did turn his head to look at the clock. Yes, his reaction time out of the starting blocks was better than in Beijing. And, yes, he was in the lead after just 20 meters, which is good work for a man of his height who usually trails more compact sprinters early in the race.
But according to former the world-record holder Donovan Bailey of Canada, Bolt straightened up too early, thereby losing early propulsion. “In Beijing, of all the finalists, he was the worst technically,” Bailey said. “He’s improved a lot, but he can still go faster and improve his first 30 meters.”
Guy Ontanon, a veteran French sprint coach, analyzed Sunday’s final for the French sports newspaper L’Équipe and also remarked on Bolt’s premature rise from the drive phase. “He really gave it what he had, which explains the time game,” Ontanon wrote. “But he can still pick up five- or six-hundredths of a second. It’s monstrous to do what he did in this race, despite that error.”
Five- or six-hundredths faster would take Bolt into the low 9.5s, but he said he liked his chances of reaching the 9.4s.
“I think it will stop at 9.4, but you never know,” Bolt said Sunday. “We’ll just keep racing.”
That is welcome news for a once-mighty sport that has been losing market share and hammered by doping scandals for too long. It is no coincidence that Lamine Diack, president of the I.A.A.F., track and field’s world governing body, made the unusual gesture of sharing the head table with the 100-meter medalists at Sunday’s news conference (even if no one directed any questions to him).
Diack knows that Bolt is a potential one-man renaissance. His actions and antics might not please traditionalists, but they seem to strike a chord with younger fans, and even his competitors.
The once intense and intimidating buildup to the 100 is fast turning into a series of vaudevillian shorts as the camera pans across the starting line. Even the once-deadpan Powell came up with a stunt: putting his hip number on his lips and shaking his face for the camera.
But all has not been fun and games for the Jamaicans in Berlin. Powell, who took the bronze medal Sunday in 9.84 seconds, was barred from the team briefly last week after choosing not to attend a team training camp. Diack and the I.A.A.F. later persuaded Jamaican officials to reinstate him.
There have been other thorny issues this season. Jamaica, for the first time, has had multiple doping cases to process. Five lesser-known athletes tested positive for a stimulant, but the details and penalties were still unclear as the I.A.A.F. examined the issue this week.
The 100-meter world record has a checkered history of its own. Since 1988, Ben Johnson of Canada and Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin of the United States were stripped of the record for doping offenses.
But Bolt has not failed a test. The scary part for Bolt’s rivals is that he is still well short of the traditional prime age for sprinters.
“I knew it was humanly possible for someone to run that fast,” Gay said Sunday. “Unfortunately it wasn’t me.”