Superman Has Left The Building: By Len Johnson

The news that Usain Bolt has called his season to a close due to a lower-back injury means two things. First, we won’t get to say a race between Bolt, Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell this year and, second, there is an excellent chance that we will see Bolt back to his lightning-fast best when the major championships roll round in 2011 and 2012.

So, good news to lighten the impact of the bad.

A few columns back I wrote of the ill-fated ‘Covett’ series of race which had purported to showcase three meetings _ over 800, 1500 and 3000 metres _ between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett back in 1982. The pair were the best two middle-distance athletes in the world back then, and the series seemed a surefire winner.

It wasn’t: Ovett got injured and ran only one of the three races; Coe fell ill and did not run any of them.

Bolt v Gay v Powell has now suffered a similar fate. There will be no meeting between the three, although Bolt has raced Powell (beating his compatriot in Paris) and Gay (losing to the American in Stockholm) and Gay has raced Powell (beating him in Gateshead). Unless Gay runs faster before the end of the season, Bolt and Powell are likely to top the 100 performance lists at 9.82, but Gay to get the number one ranking. None of the three has gone within cooee of Bolt’s world record set in winning the 100 at the world championships last year (though Gay, or Powell if he recovers quickly from a groin injury, may yet get closer).

The situation underlines the danger of trying to showcase a season around one or more head-to-heads. There’s a growing history now of such attempts coming unstuck _ the Covett series, Donovan Bailey vs Michael Johnson for world’s fastest man, and now Bolt v Gay v Powell . At least when Shawn Crawford races a zebra, both protagonists are pretty well guaranteed to get to the line!

If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, best not to drop it.