The Hindu : Sport : Inspiring awe

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Thursday, Jun 05, 2008
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Inspiring awe — and also cynicism

The fastest man in the world isn’t quite the label it used to be, writes Rohit Brijnath

Usain Bolt, a gift from a grinning God to headline writers, is redefining mankind’s notion of fast. So swiftly does he move that he covers a distance similar to the length of a football field in less time than it takes you to tie your laces.

Bolt’s 9.72 seconds for the 100 metres (10.28 metres per second, if you can digest that) inevitably made many front pages — long jumpers could leap distances just short of the Grand Canyon and it wouldn’t happen to them.

Speed is like some planetary addiction. Fast we like, whether it’s Valentino Rossi howling down a trak and Sea Biscuit snorting down a straight, or Ronaldo slithering down the wing and Roger Federer skating after a forehand.

Pure athletic endeavour

Speed is the foundation for most athletic success: from a quarterback to a squash player, if you’re not quick, you can’t win. But the 100-metre runner is unique for he presents speed in its purest form over the perfect distance. Fifty metres is inadequate for runners may just be arriving at top speed, and 120 metres is too long for sprinters have started decelerating much earlier.

The sprinter neither kicks a ball nor manipulates a racquet, he just runs — a sort of grown up version of a kid racing down a corridor shouting “you can’t catch me.”

But he’s more than that. He’s like a test pilot trying to take the machine that is the human body faster than it has ever gone before.

If asked how far humans have come, we’d say a massive 9.05 metres, because that’s the distance by which Bolt would beat the first recognised 100 metres record holder, Don Lippincott, who timed 10.6 in 1912.

For the six billion odd people on this planet, Bolt is our ambassador of acceleration; if there’s a Milky Way sprint-off, he’s our man.

A sport on trial

We’re just hoping he’s clean. We’re just praying for an authentic hero. Bolt, it must be said, has done nothing wrong, he is an uncontaminated athletic marvel, a pure galloping genius, and if his world record doesn’t quite stir us at it should, it’s nothing personal.

It’s merely that his breed has let us down to the point where every new sprinting feat comes attached with a serving of suspicion. Bolt is not on trial at all, but his sport is.

Britain’s Dawyne Chambers was exposed as a fraud, Kelli White as a phony, Marion Jones as a fake.

And the woman who may get Jones’s Sydney 100 metres gold medal, Katerina Thanou, was suspended after missing drugs tests before the 2004 Olympics.

The more the urine of sprinters has told ugly tales the more cynicism was injected in our veins. As jaws grow longer with human growth hormone, so has our disenchantment.

When Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin — all 100-metre world record holders — were unmasked as cheats, medals were lost. So was trust.

After all, the spectator’s most disillusioning moment is when he realises his hero is not credible, his champion is a fraud. It is hard to find your cheering has been for nothing.

A saviour needed

Sprinting, perhaps the oldest of mankind’s athletic arts, needs a saviour, requires a runner to return respect to its ranks, a runner whose feats will be seen as borne of only pain and passion.

Perhaps Bolt will be that man, perhaps he will outsprint cynicism and make the label “fastest man in the world” something to brag about again.

But till then we will salute his effort, appreciate his speed, but embrace completely only sports where the gifts of co-ordination cannot be delivered by a drug. With Federer, with Kaka, with Rossi, at least we know their art is not counterfeit.

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