Usain Just Runs Faster: By Len Johnson

One of my favourite press conference stories concerns the great Ethiopian runner Miruts Yifter after he won the 1980 Moscow Olympic 10,000 metres.

I wasn't there, but the story goes that a Finnish journalist asked a convoluted tactical question which boiled down to what would have happened if Lasse Viren had made a move with five laps to go instead of with 300 metres to go.

The question was translated into Amharic (for Yifter), English, French (the IOC languages) and Russian. Yifter gave a brief reply which travelled back the same torturous route.

"I would have run faster," said the man known as "Yifter the Shifter".

Well tonight in the Olympic stadium, Tyson Gay found out what happens when you run faster than you ever have in your life and venture into territory which had hitherto belonged exclusively to Usain Bolt.

Simply put, Bolt just runs faster.

Consider this, Tyson Gay ran 9.71 seconds, a time bettered before last night only by Bolt's 9.69 world record set at the Beijing Olympics. Instead of the gap to the Olympic champion closing, in fact it widened. Gay ran within 0.02 of where Bolt had been, but Bolt ran a world record 9.58 and the American is now further behind than he's ever been!

Take that. To his credit, Gay was not dismayed at this turn of events. After the race, he still professed his confidence that he could also run that fast.

Asafa Powell, third in 9.84, was almost a spectator. The former world record holder has talked a good race all season, and indeed he ran about where the world record was before first he and now Bolt took it over. But injuries had not allowed him to get into shape to run down in the 9.5s.

Powell would, he said, be going home to train to run 9.58. It will take some doing.

Bolt was asked in the press conference whether he had taken the sport into a new dimension. Most would say he has, but he seemed to suggest he hasn't. Perhaps he is happy for everyone else to be in awe of him, but he does not want to be in awe of himself.

Bolt did allow that 9.58 was something special (presumably royalties are on their way to Bruce as you read this) and that he was proud of himself for being the first man there (he is, of course, the first and only man to the 9.6s, too).

Bolt also explained his pre-race joking around. He works hard all year to prepare to race the 100, he said, so he can fool around on the starting line. As soon as the starter says, 'on your marks', however, he is back in focus. You'd better believe that.

As in Beijing, Bolt nailed his start when it mattered, and led when he came out of his drive phase. "When I got to 50 in the lead I knew it was going to be hard to pass me because that's the best part of my race."

As Steve Cram wrote in a BBC column recently, Bolt is now enjoying that window in his career during which great performances seem to come almost at will and without effort. The latter is, of course, an illusion: Bolt works damn hard, but the impression he gives is otherwise.

In the meantime, his rivals, chiefly Gay and Powell right now, but others will aspire to the standards Bolt is setting, watch on in wonder.

"I knew it was humanly possible to run that fast," said Gay. "I'm just sorry that it wasn't me," he added ruefully.

"I knew I needed to run the perfect race to win," Powell observed, "but I'm not 100 percent healthy to really challenge 9.58."

The perfect race: Powell needed to run it to have a chance; so, too, did Gay. Trouble was, it was Usain Bolt who most closely approached perfection this day.




 

Len Johnson was The Melbourne Age athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games. He is the author of The Landy Era, From Nowhere to the Top of the World, and a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) who trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella.