Kamau Peterson
CFL.ca
Often players really get away from it all on the bye week and go camping, rafting, etc. to take their minds completely off of football, often distancing themselves from TV, phone and internet. I can certainly understand that, and I tend to distance myself from the job as well with plenty of golf and family.
This year however, I am thoroughly glad that was near a television for what turned out to be one of the Top-5 athletic performances that I can say that I’ve seen in my lifetime as Usain Bolt broke his own world records in the 100m and 200m at the World Championships.
“Bolt was averaging 10.8m per second which translates to roughly 34.4 km/h. So basically, to put that into perspective this man cannot legally run in a school zone.”
At the same time, it really is a shame to me that this feat will perhaps never get the attention and reverence that it deserves simply because the state that we have allowed professional sports to reach in the way of performance enhancing drugs.
In the last four years alone sport at its highest level has been absolutely rocked by this phenomenon with names ranging from Shawne Merriman, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Andy Petite, Roger Clements, Deuce McAllister, Rodney Harrison along with high level performers like Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin, and even Lance Armstrong have all had their names linked to steroid use.
What this has done is to allow the general sports watching public to take a jaded view on greatness in most if not all major sports. Watching Michael Phelps win eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympic Games in swimming must have been the highlight of the games in addition to Bolt’s performance to me.
Phelps is widely considered to be the greatest swimmers in history, as he has won 14 career Olympic gold medals, the most by any Olympian. As of August 2, 2009, Phelps has broken thirty-seven world records in swimming yet in spite all of this, a prominent question that comes up when he is spoken of, is the notion that he may not be a clean athlete – in spite of the fact that he’s never tested positive for any PED’s. I fear that the same taint is being cast over this young man-child Usain Bolt.
Bolt announced his presence with authority at the Olympic Games in Beijing this past summer doubling up in the 100m and 200m claiming world and Olympic records in both with times of 9.69s and 19.30s respectively. He also ran a 9.0 split on the third leg of the world record holding Olympic gold medal winning Jamaican 4x100m team. While that performance is in my Top-10 for sure… Berlin this past week was truly something to see.
Case in point – Tyson Gay. Tyson ran the fastest 100m time ever by an American sprinter, and his time of 9.71s would have won ever other race at that distance in history except for the Olympic final that I mentioned earlier that Bolt won, and of course this 2009 World Championship final in Berlin.
In spite of that, Tyson Gay was not even present in the photo finish picture as he was three full strides behind Bolt as his shoulders crossed the finish line in an unbelievable time of 9.58s to erase his own world record.
Only four days later Bolt returned to run the 200m final in a ridiculous time of 19.19s shattering his old mark and dominating the field by several meters. 19-year-old Alonso Edward of Panama finished in what seemed like a distant second visually in a time of 19.81s and in doing so became the youngest ever world medalist in the men’s 200m. His time is also a world age-19 best, breaking the 19.88s set by Bolt in 2006. And anyone who breaks one of Bolt’s records is certainly set for a bright future.
I find that I’ve been struggling to explain the magnitude of these times to those who have not run track at a high level, so I’ll put it into other terms. In Bolt’s 200m masterpiece in Berlin his split time for his first 100m was 9.92s and his split for the second 100m was 9.27s. Thus, the second 100m of that race, Bolt was averaging 10.8m per second which translates to roughly 24.1 mph or 34.43 km/h. So basically, to put that into perspective this man cannot legally run in a school zone.
While I definitely understand the stance that many take on such a dominant performance, and seem to sadly take towards track and field in general these days regarding performances like these and PED’s I’m viewing this differently, and I won’t be swayed unless proven otherwise. I view this man in a similar light to how I once viewed Randy Moss, and how I now see Lebron James and Michael Phelps; as a man-child, a product of Darwinism, I see athletes like this as the quantum leap in human capability that we see every 50-100 years or so depending on the sport.
In Bolt you have a young man who turned 23-yrs-old last week just after breaking these records, who stands 6’5” and weighs 190 lbs. If speed is a product of stride length multiplied by stride frequency, then a man that size who possesses enough fast twitch muscle fiber to turnover his strides with the frequency of a man 5 inches shorter is going to have the capabilities to do exactly what we’re seeing him do right now. And at 23-years-old, he has not peaked yet in his field.
I honestly do not envy the position of the sports fan in this day and age, much of what they see will be difficult to take in the way it is intended to be digested due to so much uncertainty brought on by the day and age of these PED’s and how rampant their usage has become.
However, I challenge you to keep your eyes peeled as you scan through the satellite programming. Every now and then your eyes may fall upon an athlete, or an athletic performance whose image you’ll carry with you for all your days, and you too will be able to say that you were witness to greatness.
