Usain Bolt was denied perfect end to his career
as Justin Gatlin clinched gold at the World Championships
Gatlin clocked 9.92 seconds to beat Christian
Coleman as Bolt finished third in his final individual race
Jamaican retires after next week's 4x100m relay
but despite a season best of 9.95 he was comfortably beaten
Gatlin - banned twice for doping - was booed
before race and celebrated wildly, putting his finger to his lips
A terrible silence met the end of the men's 100m
final at the World Championships in the London Stadium on Saturday night. What
was supposed to be a night of celebration turned into a night of shame. What
was supposed to be a river of gold turned into a track of bitter tears.
Not only was Usain Bolt, the great hero of the
sport, denied victory in his final individual race but it was won by the
American two-time drugs cheat, Justin Gatlin. A rom-com turned into a slasher
movie and athletics' worst nightmare unfolded in front of a watching world.
The fans who had packed into the stadium to
savour every last moment of this race, hoping for one last signature Bolt
moment of celebration, one final flourish, one last waltz, one more victory
pose pointing his arrow to the sky, watched in stunned amazement as Gatlin
dipped for the line a fraction of a second ahead.
Bolt was third, beaten to the silver medal by
the young American Christian Coleman, who had also beaten him in the semi-final
a couple of hours earlier. When the result flashed up on screen, the hush was
replaced by booing and then denial. Everyone pretended Bolt had won anyway.
Even Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic men's 100m
champion, knelt before him in theatrical awe of his greatness. Gatlin shushed
the crowd but he was roundly booed anyway and it was Bolt who was interviewed
trackside and told that the whole stadium loved him. Gatlin celebrated alone.
Two years ago, the BBC commentator Steve Cram
said that Bolt had saved the sport when he beat Gatlin at the World
Championships in Beijing. So what does this say? Nothing good, I'm afraid. On
Saturday night, the only feeling was that something more than a race had been
lost here.
And the truth is that athletics made this
happen. Athletics allowed Gatlin to come back after doping bans. Not once but
twice. And it made it easy for him, too. Nike even rewarded him with a new
sponsorship deal after his second failed test. I'm sorry, but you reap what you
sow.
How does Lord Coe, the president of the IAAF,
feel now, I wonder? A few days ago, he insisted that doping was not his sport's
most pressing problem. Really? A 35-year-old two time drug cheat, who got
faster as he got older, just ruined the farewell of track and field's greatest
Olympian. If there's a more pressing problem than that, I want to hear about
it.
After the race, the crowd kept being told that
Bolt was the saviour of the sport but this was the worst possible outcome for a
saviour. Not just to be beaten in a major final for the first time in ten years
but to lose to Gatlin, the American who symbolises everything that is wrong
with athletics.
Perhaps that was why it was so galling when
Gatlin put his finger to his lips in the moment he realised he had won. What?
He thinks that his victory is a vindication of something? He thinks that it is
a defeat for those who speak out against doping in sport? Don't make us all
laugh. The only thing his victory proves is that athletics is still stuck in
its cycle of self-destruction.
How many more people will turn away from it now
that Bolt, who was seen as the last bastion of hope, has been beaten in his
final race by an athlete who is seen as one of the most powerful symbols of the
cheating that has disfigured the sport?
This was the moment that athletics has been
dreading. Not because Bolt lost and Gatlin won but because it marked the moment
when the sport could no longer shelter beneath the Jamaican's wings, the moment
when the camouflage of the greatest showman it has ever had, was taken away and
the sport had to be judged without him.
For all the reforming efforts of Lord Coe,
athletics was still not a pretty sight even before Gatlin's win. Events on
Saturday night were speckled with competitors called 'authorised neutrals',
innocent refugees from Russia's state-sponsored doping programme that has led
to the country's ongoing suspension. The label makes them sound like extras
from Blade Runner.
The crowd here also witnessed another absurdly
dominant run by Olympic women's 10,000m gold medallist Almaz Ayana. It was met
with a strange mixture of giddy awe, disbelief and downright cynicism. This is
athletics' cursed hinterland, a place where even Bolt's greatness cannot reach.
Colin Jackson pointed out last week that
athletics existed before Bolt. Well, yes, but it was not morally bankrupt in
the minds of the public before Bolt. It is now. Especially now. Especially
after the triumph of Gatlin. Bolt was all that stood between athletics and the
abyss.
All that is left for now is to take solace in
what Bolt achieved before anti-climax invaded his career at the last. This is
the record that we look back on now: eight gold medals at the Olympic Games in
Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro, 11 World Championship golds and world
records in the 100m and 200m that may take a long time to be beaten.
When he burst into the world's wider
consciousness before those Beijing Olympics, the ebullience of his character
was a glorious contrast to the orchestrated order of those Games in the
beautiful Bird's Nest. And in the next nine years, his star shone more and more
brightly.
Out of the smoking ruins of athletics, Bolt has
emerged to attain a status granted only to a very few in the history of sport.
He has earned the kind of adulation only bestowed on those who achieve
greatness with style and grace and charisma.
His breathtaking list of achievements combined
with his personal dynamism means he is mentioned in the same breath as Muhammad
Ali, Tiger Woods, Pele and Roger Federer.
What separates them is that the others had
rivalries to define their greatness. Bolt has been a one-man band. For him,
there has been no Joe Frazier, no Bobby Moore and no Rafael Nadal. In
athletics, there is only Bolt and then there is the void.
Bolt's importance to the sport in the last
decade is all but impossible to overstate. One of the most charismatic athletes
the world has ever seen, he has reigned at a time when athletics has been
brought to its knees by a long series of doping controversies.
Its past sins still haunt its present and not
just in the triumph of Gatlin. A few minutes before Bolt's semi-final on
Saturday, Britain's Jo Pavey climbed on a podium here in the Olympic Stadium to
be presented with a bronze medal from a World Championships women's 10,000m
that took place ten years ago.
Pavey was upgraded from fourth to third after
Turkey's Elvan Abeylegesse, who originally won silver in the Osaka
championships, was found guilty of an in-competition doping offence. Kara
Goucher, who has made allegations against Mo Farah's coach, Alberto Salazar,
was moved up from bronze to silver. Doping still lingers like a restless ghost
around this sport.
In his years at the top, most of Bolt's main
rivals have been stripped away, not by age or injury, but by doping
suspensions. Gatlin, Asafa Powell, Yohan Blake and Tyson Gay, all pretenders to
his crown at one time or another, have been tainted by ignominy and shame.
Athletics is a land of scorched earth and Bolt
has hurtled across it in a yellow and green blur, an icon of brightness in a
desert of doping. Of the 30 fastest 100m times ever, only nine were achieved by
a clean athlete - and all were run by Bolt.
In that climate, it is understandable that
athletics has become trapped in an unhealthy inward-looking culture where those
who exhibit anything other than blind admiration for the two stars of these
championships, Bolt and Farah, are treated not as people who want to help the
sport but as pariahs.
So even though Salazar is under investigation by
the United States Anti-Doping Agency over a raft of alleged doping violations,
and there remain questions about Farah's two missed drugs tests in the run up
to the London Olympics, anyone who raises those issues becomes a non-person.
This era of athletics loves nothing better than
shooting the messenger. Even on Saturday, a British Athletics official made a
huge drama out of a Farah press briefing because of fears it might be
infiltrated by a journalist who would ask Farah inconvenient questions.
For all the awe that greeted Farah's victory in
the 10,000m here on Friday night, there are equal measures of paranoia
emanating from Farah and his entourage. There remain legitimate questions to be
asked of him and he has chosen to avoid answering them.
That is the world that Bolt has presided over
with such majesty, a world of suspicion and doubt and fear and loathing, a
world where no one quite knows whether to believe that what they are seeing is
real.
It is perhaps the greatest of Bolt's triumphs
that he dominated his events so completely and still rose above the suspicion
that cloaks the rest of his sport. He has been a light in the darkness and now
the light has gone.
Culled from: DAILYMAIL
No comments:
Post a Comment