A Bolt on history

The stunning Jamaican leaves large shoes to fill

One lesson experienced sports fans learn is that applying the title of “The Greatest” to any sporting personality is a hazardous exercise. This would be as valid for Usain Bolt, the Jamaican runner who hung up his boots at the age of 31 earlier this month. On the face of it, Bolt’s glittering career certainly appears to qualify for the maximalist title. He has achieved two gold medals in two events — 100 metres and 200 metres — in three consecutive Olympic Games (Beijing in 2008, London in 2012 and Rio in 2016). It could have been a historic “Triple Triple”, three gold medals in three events, as he was also part of the 4X100 metre relay team that won the gold in those three Olympics. But he lost the claim to this title earlier this year when one of his Beijing relay team-mates retrospectively tested positive for a banned substance, and the entire Jamaican relay quartet was stripped of their gold medals.

Bolt is one of just three track and field athletes, Carl Lewis of the US and Paavo Nurmi of Finland being the other two, to win nine Olympic Golds (only swimmer Michael Phelps holds more Olympic Golds, a phenomenal 23). Bolt currently holds the world records for 100 metres (9.58 seconds), 200 metres (19.19 seconds) and the 4X100 metre relay (26.84 seconds). 

But to cement Bolt’s 6-foot 5-inch frame on the highest pedestal may be unwise for several reasons. Comparing athletes across eras is a tricky affair principally because performance is as much a product of advances in training techniques, diet, equipment (running shoes, for instance) and conditions (indoor synthetic running tracks). All of these give later athletes an incomparable advantage over their predecessors. In cricket, for instance, heavier bats certainly played a role in Sachin Tendulkar’s batting performance, just as much as wider heads and tighter string tensions provide the extraordinary power for Roger Federer and Serena Williams. 

This does not, of course, detract from the exceptional talent of all these sportspeople — after all, their competition enjoys the same technological advantages. Like Bolt, all would justifiably qualify for “the greatest” title in their respective eras. But the suffix “of all time” is an open question; in a dynamic business like sports, records are meant to be broken, and just as Bolt shattered many, it is possible that his will be broken in due course (the exception, perhaps, could well be Donald Bradman, for whom the law of averages may cement for all time a batting average of 99.94 in a war-interrupted career). 

Underlining this point, an article published on the website The Conversation presents a study comparing Bolt’s performances to the fastest performance of previous athletes over the same track distances, adjusted for changing time trends and environment and political factors (such as world wars). Strikingly, in the 100 metres distance alone, the study shows a precipitous drop in the fastest expected race time. For men, the time has dropped from 10.6 seconds in 1912 to 9.7 seconds in 2016; for women, the relevant times are 11.8 seconds in 1951 to 10.7 seconds in 2016. “This pattern of decreasing times is observed for race times across all distances,” the article states. 

After crunching the numbers, the result suggests that Bolt can claim to hold the greatest label for the 100 metres dash. But ultimately, this is a meaningless debate. It detracts from the sheer entertainment that he offered fans of watching a superbly gifted athlete strutting his stuff on the world stage for almost a decade. To watch Bolt’s explosive start off the blocks and his powerful stride and running technique were rare privileges, his infectious grin as he left the competition far behind unforgettable. He may yet be overtaken but like all exceptional sportspeople he will remain a shining star in his heyday. More than almost any other athlete in the post-Soviet era (when drug testing advanced by several orders of magnitude) he has come to define the spirit of competition.