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Bolt defies explanation
By JOE POSNANSKIThe Kansas City Star
BEIJING | How fast could he have gone? That was the question raging Saturday night in Beijing, the question raging in parts all over the world, the only question to ask after we watched Jamaica’s Usain Bolt reinvent the 100-meter dash at the Olympics.
His run was mind-boggling. Freakish. Revolutionary. Bolt ran hard for 80 meters and coasted his last seven strides, his arms stretched out by his side, and then he looked around, and slowed down for the cameras and tapped his heart, and all day he’d only eaten chicken nuggets, and his left shoe was untied, and he still ran the race in 9.69 seconds, which is longer than it probably took you to read this run-on sentence and also just so happens to be the fastest time in this history of the entire world.
How fast? One coach said he could have run it in 9.6 flat.
“I’m not worried about world records,” Bolt said.
How fast? The whispers were that he could have run it in 9.55.
“I only race to win,” Bolt said.
How fast? He beat Richard Thompson by .2 seconds, which was the biggest gap between first and second in an Olympic 100 meters since Carl Lewis ran away from fellow American Sam Graddy in 1984. The difference is that Bolt was very apparently not even trying at the end.
“I could see him slowing down, and I was still pumping to the line,” Thompson said.
There has never been anything at the Olympics quite like this guy, never anyone who ran so fast while seeming to exert so little. Bolt seemed to put more energy into the dances he did before and after the race than he did in the race. He seemed so unconcerned about his time that, he insisted, he did not even know he had set the world record until after he had taken a victory lap. Then, once he realized that he had set it, he graciously posed in front of the electronic scoreboard for photographers.
How fast could he have gone? The question reveals the wonder of Usain Bolt. Anything’s possible. He burst on the scene only about a year ago, when he begged his coach to let him run the most glamorous race, the 100-meter dash. Bolt’s event had been 200 meters. The coach relented. Less than a year later, in May, Bolt ran the second-fastest 100-meter time ever. Four weeks later, in New York, he ran the fastest.
That’s when all the other sprinters first realized that they might be dealing with something entirely new, a 6-foot-5 sprinting prodigy from another planet. The fastest men in the world were often tall — Carl Lewis, for instance, was 6-2 — but Bolt was the first one tall enough to play small forward on a basketball team. He was not a naturally great starter because it took a little longer to unfold his big frame, but he had such long strides, and he brought such a force of energy to his runs that he moved and chased like some sprinting Terminator coming back from the future.
The first time I saw him run live was Friday evening in a 100-meter preliminary, and it was entirely different from anything I had ever seen. Bolt danced around happily before the race. For years now, we have watched the former fastest man in the world Maurice Greene walk with intensity before his race, as if he were surveying the ground, as if he were visualizing every step of his race, as if he were preparing for his SAT.
Now here was this tall, gangling guy from Jamaica looking around and laughing and pointing at people, as if he were getting ready to give the best man’s speech at the wedding. The gun sounded, Bolt broke with the pack, then he pulled ahead, then he pulled way ahead, and then he cut off the engines. It happened that fast. Bolt slowed down to the point where it really looked as if he would run the last 15 meters or so backward. He could have done that and still won the race. He crossed in 9.92 — a time fast enough to make him a legit medal contender — and this was running half a race.
And my thought: What the heck was that? Nobody on earth should be able to run 100 meters in 9.92 without even trying. But that’s what we were dealing with. Saturday morning, according to Bolt’s own account, he casually woke up at 11 a.m. or so Beijing time, sat around his hotel room and watched a little television and then had some chicken nuggets (“I saw him eat the nuggets,” Richard Thompson would say). He returned to his room, went back to sleep for a while, woke up and had a few more chicken nuggets.
Then, in his semifinal heat, about 2 1/2 hours before the final, he appeared to stop running with a third of the race remaining. He looked both ways, saw no one around him, and he stopped pumping his arms, he shortened his stride, he checked up. He was almost walking when he crossed the finish line. He crossed in 9.85 seconds, which would have been fast enough to win Olympic gold. It was no fluke. I had seen it twice.
So, in a weird way, there were no real surprises when Bolt ran his groundbreaking gold-medal race. It really followed the same pattern — he started OK, then left the others as if they had gum on their shoes and then put it into cruise control. The only thing anyone around could even compare it to — and it wasn’t an especially vivid comparison — was Ben Johnson’s electrifying race in 1988, when he ran the 100 in 9.79, shattering his own world record, squashing the great Carl Lewis. Johnson also lost some precious hundredths of a second when he raised his arms at the finish line.
Johnson, though, was disqualified three days later after he tested positive for steroids. Now, when someone does anything remarkable, as Bolt did, those harsh questions are impossible to silence. These are the times. What looks unbelievable in today’s harsh sports world is, in fact, very hard to believe.
But Bolt has never tested positive for anything, and there have been few rumors about him. And in the end, if you can’t believe, really, then what fun is it all? On Saturday night, in front of 90,000 at the Bird’s Nest, a 21-year-old Jamaican named Usain Bolt won Olympic gold and set the world record, and the rest is left to the imagination. How fast could he have gone?
“Faster,” Bolt said.