He already had a top gear challenge back in Jamaica! He better stay in first gear on the roads there!
Section: BEIJING: 2008 OLYMPICS
TRACK AND FIELD
Usain Bolt won the 100 meters in world-record time with such ease that you have to wonder: How much lower than 9.69 can he go?
A GOLF CART raced through wide, clean tunnels under the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. Volunteers jumped aside, lest they be flattened. Banners flapped in the little vehicle’s slipstream, and passengers gripped tiny handrails. Usain Bolt slid right and left on the cushion of the passenger seat, the fastest man alive going even faster. He wore Jamaica’s colors-green, yellow and black-on a T-shirt, and from his neck hung the Olympic 100-meter gold medal. “We should race a 100 in the cart,” said Bolt’s agent, Ricky Simms, and Bolt laughed in a youthful baritone from deep in his chest.
“That would be fast, man,” he said. “Very fast.” They whipped around a corner, buzzed up a concrete ramp and into the warm China night, bound for a car that would drive Bolt back to the Olympic Village.
Fast has new meaning now. Bolt did not just win the gold medal last Saturday night, he ran away from the field in 9.69 seconds and broke his 11-week-old world record by .03 of a second, despite letting up and celebrating the final 10 long strides, making a joke of the concepts of competition and record-keeping. Not 400 meters across a concrete courtyard from where Michael Phelps had redefined greatness in water, Bolt did likewise on dry earth. “They are both freaks of nature; there is no other way to put it,” said Donovan Bailey, the Jamaican-born Canadian who won the 100 meters at the 1996 Olympics and whose Olympic-record time of 9.84 Bolt obliterated. “Usain is amazing, absolutely amazing.”
Now Bolt, just 21 years old and 6’5", stepped from his undersized chariot in a parking lot lit by tall, ornate streetlamps. Volunteer workers in logo shirts stared and whispered. “This is why you run,” Bolt said. “Definitely, man. All the time I’ve been running, I dreamed about getting on the biggest stage and being a champion someday. Here it is. Big feat, man, big feat.”
He is young and at the same time old at the game. A Jamaican schoolboy legend (no small title on a sprint-centric island) in his early teens and a world junior champion in the 200 meters at 15, Bolt did not attempt the 100 on a world-class level until last summer and broke the world record in only his fourth final. The Olympics were just his eighth final, and he is speeding the evolution of his event just as Bob Beamon advanced his (the long jump in 1968) and Michael Johnson his (the 200 in '96). “We’re looking at the future,” said four-time Olympic medalist and NBC sprint analyst Ato Boldon. “This kid is something like we’ve never seen before.”
The 100 meters was not nearly the conclusion of Bolt’s Olympic work. He was scheduled to run the 200-meter final on Wednesday night, and Johnson’s 12-year-old world record of 19.32 seconds, once thought untouchable, was expected to receive its first serious assault. “If he gets someone to push him through the corner [turn], we could see something unbelievable,” said Bailey. “I’m thinking between 19.22 and 19.26.”
Bolt is also expected to anchor Jamaica’s 4x100-meter relay on Friday night. He laughed when he looked ahead, pulling on the brim of a Jamaican team baseball cap. “I feel very good, man,” he said. “Yeah, yeah. I feel strong.”
On a breezy evening some 24 hours later, a trio of Jamaican women added a punctuation mark to Bolt’s feat when Shelly-Ann Fraser won the women’s 100-meter gold medal and Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart finished in a dead heat for silver, the first women’s 100-meter medal sweep in Olympic history. Despite having three sprinters in the field, the U.S. was denied a spot on the podium for the first time since 1976 (although 2000 became a shutout when Marion Jones was later stripped of her gold medals for admitted steroid use).
“The Jamaicans showed up, and we totally didn’t,” said Lauryn Williams, the defending silver medalist who placed fourth. “It’s very humbling.”
Fraser ran a ripping 10.78 with calm winds, the fastest final time in Olympic history. (Florence Griffith Joyner ran a wind-aided 10.54 in 1988 and Jones a vacated 10.75 in 2000.) While many Jamaican sprinters have attended college and run track in the U.S., Fraser, like Bolt, instead stayed home to train with the growing MVP Track Club in Kingston. She came to prominence while running barefoot in the Jamaican primary schools’ (12-and-under) championship, and her Olympic time was a personal best by .07. “It was the performance of a lifetime,” Fraser squealed afterward. “I can’t stop smiling; my braces are hurting me.”
BOLT’S TITLE was the first for Jamaica in the Games’ signature sprint. (Like Bailey, Linford Christie of Great Britain, the gold medalist in 1992, was born in Jamaica but competed for another nation; Jamaicans have won three silver medals.) Bolt came to Beijing as chalk. The depth of this favorite’s role depended on a handicapper’s belief that Tyson Gay of the U.S. and Asafa Powell of Jamaica were capable of turning the race into the three-man showdown that track fans had anticipated since the spring.
But there were big issues for both. Gay, the 2007 world champion and U.S. Olympic trials winner in an American-record 9.77 seconds, was trying to regain sharpness after injuring his hamstring in the 200 meters at the trials on July 5 and missing four weeks of hard training. But that hill was too steep to climb. Gay struggled through the first two preliminaries. Expert observers saw a shell of the old Gay. “The guy who could pressure Bolt is Tyson,” said former British Olympic sprinter Darren Campbell on Saturday morning before the semifinals. “But the Tyson who’s here isn’t really Tyson.”
Gay was eliminated in the semifinals. Afterward, his voice catching, Gay said, “I gave it my best; I just didn’t come through. I just didn’t have that pop like at USAs. I feel like I let [my family] down.” Gay could still run for the U.S. in the 4x100-meter relay, a unit that will have its hands very full with Jamaica.
Powell, 25, was visited by old demons. Fifth in the 2004 Olympics as the favorite, second in the '07 worlds as the favorite, he had hoped to shed his Olympic insecurities in Beijing. “Asafa is the baby of six children, so he has taken time to be strong,” said Powell’s oldest brother, Donovan, before the Games. “But I think it will be different this time.” Alas, it was not. Powell, who had beaten Bolt at a race in Stockholm in late July, ran tight and finished fifth.
Bolt, meanwhile, treated the Games like a night in one of the Kingston clubs he loves. He roomed with Jamaican decathlete Maurice Smith in the Olympic Village. “All I did was relax,” Bolt said after the 100. “I ate my nuggets at McDonald’s, I chilled, I focused. That’s all it is.”
Bolt’s mother, Jennifer, was the only family member who went to Beijing. His father, Wellesley, stayed home, in the north shore parish of Trelawny. “My dad is not into getting on airplanes,” said Bolt. “It’s O.K. I know the whole country is behind me.”
Bolt easily won his semifinal heat in 9.85 seconds into a slight headwind, the fastest semifinal in Olympic history. As in each of his preliminary races, Bolt cruised much of the straightaway, uncatchable even in a low gear. “If you add up all four of his races, he barely ran a full 100 meters,” said Bailey. “He expended very little energy.” Before the final, Bolt stayed loose on the training track adjacent to the stadium. His coach, the relentlessly grumpy Glen Mills, jokingly leveled the threat that Bolt most fears. “If you don’t win the gold medal, I’ll make you run the 400,” said Mills.
“They were like little kids before the race,” said Simms. “No nerves at all.”
Minutes before 10:30 p.m. in China, the stadium pulsed with the emotions that always precede a 100-meter final. “Groundshaking,” said Walter Dix, the 22-year-old U.S. sprinter who would run to a bronze medal, three months after his graduation from Florida State. Bolt ran through a series of comical, self-motivating gestures, firing imaginary six-shooters, pointing with two fingers at the JAMAICA on his jersey, pulling his hands apart high and low as if shooting an arrow into the night sky. He recalled the words Bailey told him last spring: “The crowd is your friend.”
Bolt came away clean if not brilliantly fast. Thirty meters out he was in a close fourth place, but his transition to top speed was otherworldly. “I felt myself pulling away from the rest of the field, and Usain was accelerating away from me,” said Richard Thompson of Trinidad, who ran at LSU. Short of 50 meters, Bolt was in front and opening daylight. At least 15 meters shy of the finish, he turned to his right and spread his arms wide as if to embrace the roaring noise. He beat his chest once at the line and as the clock first flashed 9.68, and then adjusted to 9.69, Bolt raced around the bend to the backstretch. He didn’t instantly see the record time and didn’t care. “Not important,” Bolt would say much later. “I had the record, I still have it. Now I have a gold medal too.”
HIS ASCENDANCE has been swifter than even his countrymen imagined. “I knew he would run fast if he tried the 100 meters,” said Michael Frater, a silver medalist at the 2005 world championships who finished sixth in Beijing. “But to run like this, with no wind behind him, I didn’t think he would run that fast.” (Of course, it is an unfortunate sidebar to every world record that Track Nation waits nervously for the result of Bolt’s every drug test; Powell complained before the competition that all the Jamaicans had been blood- and urine-tested too often, as if targeted.)
Behind Bolt, Thompson held together for second and Dix closed impressively. A year ago Dix had shocked observers (and cynics) by turning down lucrative offers to turn professional and instead returned to Tallahassee for his senior year. He struggled with hamstring injuries though the spring. “If you had told me in April that I’d get a bronze medal in the Olympics, I would have been shocked,” Dix said. “It’s sweeter now that I’m here.” The bronze is consolation for the U.S., but an auspicious start to the international career of Dix, who was also scheduled to run the 200.
Meanwhile, Jamaica rocked. The race was broadcast live in the country at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday; expatriates living in the U.S. asked islanders to put phones up to their televisions so that they could listen. (NBC showed the race on tape delay, more than 13 hours after its conclusion.) Shortly after the finish, street-side sound systems blasted music into the afternoon, commencing a long party. In an even larger demographic, two of the 100-meter finalists were Americans, but the other six were from the Caribbean, stunning dominance from a tiny corner of the world.
But Bolt stands alone, a subset of one.
PHOTO (COLOR): FOR STARTERS | Bolt (4) was nothing special out of the blocks, but halfway into the 100 he had the lead and was already pulling away from the field.
PHOTO (COLOR): NO CONTEST | Bolt was so far ahead that he turned to acknowledge the crowd before the finish line
PHOTO (COLOR): Dix closed fast to get the bronze.
PHOTO (COLOR): HAIL JAMAICA | Fraser (third from right) led Stewart (third from left) and Simpson (far right) across the finish line in the first medal sweep of an Olympic women’s 100 meters.
Section: TRACK AND FIELD
USAIN BOLT
In a race that jolted his sport, 21-year-old Usain Bolt of Jamaica smashed the world record for 100 meters and established himself as a threat to win multiple gold medals at the Beijing Olympics
ON A warm, breezy afternoon in late May, sprinters clogged the faded orange surface of a training track adjacent to the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. World-class athletes mixed with young children wearing tiny racing spikes, a culture worshipping a sport that struggles elsewhere. Coaches shouted instructions and punched stopwatches. Music drifted across from a nearby neighborhood called Nannyville. And all eyes found Usain Bolt, a majestic, 6’5" 21-year-old poised on the cusp of history. On May 3 Bolt had shaken the track world at a meet in Kingston by running 9.76 seconds-the second-fastest time in history, just .02 off countryman Asafa Powell’s year-old world record-in only the third 100-meter race of his life. Bolt had been a prodigy in the 200 meters, winning the world junior title at age 15 and taking a silver medal at the world championships last summer in Osaka. His sudden rise in the 100 had been unexpected even by track insiders, but Bolt knew there was much more ahead.
On May 18 in Trinidad he won another 100, in 9.92 seconds, despite a terrible start. “He came to me after that race and said, ‘The world record is there for me,’” says Bolt’s coach, Glen Mills. “He knew he would get it soon.”
Thirteen days later, to be precise. Last Saturday night at 10 minutes past 11, Bolt folded into his starting blocks for the start of the 100, the final event of the Reebok Grand Prix on Randall’s Island in New York City. It had been a long and strange evening; a thunderstorm had delayed the meet for nearly an hour, and on a spit of land in the largest city in the United States, emotional Jamaican fans dominated the crowd. The race had been hyped as a matchup between Bolt and world champion Tyson Gay of the U.S., but a week earlier Powell’s coach, Stephen Francis, had said, “From what I have seen this year, Tyson Gay is in trouble.”
At the first gun Bolt was left in the blocks, but Mike Rodgers of the U.S. was called for a false start. “The first start was very bad for me,” Bolt said later. “When they called a false start, I said, Thank God.” On the second try Bolt came out sharply and immediately put daylight on Gay, his long stride devouring the yardage. “We were on the same rhythm,” said Gay. “But his stride pattern is a whole lot bigger than mine.”
Standing at the edge of the stands, near the finish line, Mills couldn’t get a view of the race until about the 50-meter mark. “By then,” he said, “it was over.”
Bolt flashed through the line, and the scoreboard froze at 9.71 before a hundredth of a second was added for an official time of 9.72, the first 100 world record set on U.S. soil since Donovan Bailey, a Jamaican-born Canadian, won the 1996 Olympic gold medal in Atlanta in 9.84 (chart). Gay was second at 9.85, just .01 over his personal best. (Like Bolt, he rode a brisk but legal tailwind of 1.7 meters per second.) No man has ever run so fast and been beaten so soundly.
“We look like junior high kids out there compared to the man,” said Darvis Patton, a member of the U.S. gold medal 4×100-meter relay at last summer’s worlds and the third-place finisher (10.07 seconds) behind Bolt and Gay on Saturday. “What an impressive athlete. Twenty-one years old, six-foot-five. Sky’s the limit, man.”
Bolt’s emergence has altered the landscape of the Olympic-year 100 meters. It had been presumed that the 25-year-old Gay, who won the 100 and the 200 at the Osaka worlds, would be challenged by Powell, also 25, who is seeking his first major title.
But Powell injured his right shoulder while weight training in April. The injury was first reported as a pectoral strain, but the damage was more extensive, and Powell underwent surgery in Miami, leaving a scar that runs from his armpit into his upper chest. “They put me to sleep and fixed my tendons and ligaments,” Powell said on May 24 in Jamaica. He was in Miami recovering when Bolt ran his 9.76 (Powell texted congratulations), and as of late May he had not resumed start training, although he plans a full July of races in Europe. Gay spent the winter training with longtime coach Lance Braumann in Orlando, but in March he moved to Dallas to work with sprint and start consultant Jon Drummond. He is clearly-and probably intentionally-behind Bolt, aiming toward an August peak. Even Bolt pointed out, “I think Tyson Gay is not in tip-top shape yet.”
Even when Gay reaches prime condition, he will find Bolt to be a formidable opponent. Powell often struggles with the pressure of big races. While Bolt is new to the game, it is instructive that he spent Saturday sleeping peacefully in his hotel room. “All day,” he said after his record race. As recently as two weeks ago Bolt had said he might not run the 100 in the Olympics; now it is certain that he will double in the 100 and the 200. (He is scheduled to run the 200 on June 12 at a meet in Ostrava, Czech Republic.)
In the long view Bolt’s world is changed. He is now the Olympic favorite in a glamour event and is also the fastest sprinter in history. With that status comes endless and justifiable questioning about steroids and other performance enhancers. (Bolt has been drug-tested at least three times since early May, including after last Saturday’s race, and told SI in Jamaica, “I’m clean, yeah. Definitely.”) He lives at the base of a hillside in Kingston, not far from the training track. Powell lives at the crest of the ridge, where the more lavish homes are found, and drives past Bolt’s house every morning en route to practice. Bolt says he will soon consider relocating to the top of the hill, a move that would be both well-earned and symbolic.
Hyper Speed
In a 40-year span that has seen improved training, faster tracks and repeated doping scandals, the 100-meter world record has fallen to a once-unthinkable level
YEAR NAME TIME COUNTRY
1968 JIM HINES 9.95 U.S.
1983 CALVIN SMITH 9.93 U.S.
1987 BEN JOHNSON 9.83 Can.*
1987 CARL LEWIS 9.93 U.S.
1988 CARL LEWIS 9.93 U.S.
1988 BEN JOHNSON 9.79 Can.*
1988 CARL LEWIS 9.92 U.S.
1991 LEROY BURRELL 9.90 U.S.
1991 CARL LEWIS 9.86 U.S.
1994 LEROY BURRELL 9.85 U.S.
1996 DONOVAN BAILEY 9.84 Can.
1999 MAURICE GREENE 9.79 U.S.
2002 TIM MONTGOMERY 9.78 U.S.*
2005 ASAFA POWELL 9.77 Jam.
2006 JUSTIN GATLIN 9.77 U.S.*
2006 ASAFA POWELL 9.77 Jam.
2006 ASAFA POWELL 9.77 Jam.
2007 ASAFA POWELL 9.74 Jam.
2008 USAIN BOLT 9.72 Jam.
*Record nullified because of doping violation.
PHOTO (COLOR): RUNAWAY The 6’5" Bolt (4) was head and shoulders above the rest of the field, including world champion Gay.
PHOTO (COLOR): Lewis flew in '91; Johnson crashed in '88.
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
Section: HEROES
The Phenom
The newly crowned fastest man alive redefines speed and reignites the sport
THE FASTEST MAN IN THE WORLD IS SLOWING DOWN. AT LAST. “I’M TIRED,” he says, drooping into a chair in a New York City hotel room. It’s not even noon on this late September day, but he looks finished for the day. Why is Usain Bolt so weary? Could be that for a year he’s been sprinting around the globe trying to show those outside his native Jamaica where he’s known as “Lightning Bolt” his true talent. Six-foot-five-inch cricket players aren’t supposed to become world-class sprinters. But this 22-year-old giant has the capacity to accelerate from a coiled, motionless crouch like a Ferrari.
It could be he’s exhausted from his little trip to China. He went to the Beijing Olympics in August and won three gold medals for the 100 and 200 and as part of Jamaica’s 4 x 100-meter relay team. No one had ever pulled off such a triple. And world records got annihilated each time. But in the mind of the general sports fan, his individual records9.69 for the 100; 19.30 for the 200are minutia already misplaced. His smile, his joy, his exuberance, his goofiness, his golden Pumas, his Lightning Bolt poses, his dance moves these are what will be remembered. With his staggering speed and charismatic charm, Bolt emerged from the Bird’s Nest a star.
Michael Johnson, the original golden-shoe champion, was at the Beijing stadium and witnessed the Bolt magic including watching his own 200-meter world record disappear. “If you take Usain Bolt out of those Olympics, track and field was horrible,” Johnson says. He’s not knocking the achievements of other track athletes like Kenenisa Bekele or Tirunesh Dibaba or Sammy Wanjiru, each of whom set records en route to wins. But they weren’t as transcendentor as telegenicas Bolt’s heroics. Bolt provided the jolt the sport needed. “You had a situation where swimming and gymnastics had surpassed track and field as the premier sports on TV. Now, because of Usain, track and field has a chance to regain the status it once had for the 2012 Games.”
Johnson emphasizes “chance” because he knows what four years can do. Recent doping scandals have stripped gold medals from such champions as Marion Jones and Antonio Pettigrew.
Bolt is well aware of track’s tarnished image, but hopes he can make it shine again. “The sport has been humiliated,” he says. “People believe that anyone who runs fast is taking drugs. When people say that to me, I understand.” He pauses. He’s come to accept the speculation against him. He maintains that he’s clean. “All I have to do is stay clean, and over time the talk will stop.” But for now, Bolt could use a nap. His time in New York has been a whirlwind he followed the Late Show with David Letter-man with a night out dancing, returning to his hotel at 7 a.m. in time to change for Live with Regis and Kelly. He’s had three hours of media interviews and photo shoots and… “And all I want to do is sleep.” The fastest man in the world is human after all.
• For exclusive video coverage of the 2008 Heroes of Running, visit runnersworld.com/heroes.
PHOTO (COLOR): HEART OF GOLD Following the Beijing Olympics, Bolt donated $50,000 to Chinese earthquake vicitims.
PHOTO (COLOR): TALL ORDER With his record-setting performances and larger-than-life J personality, Bolt was the brightest track star of the 2008 Olympics.
By Charles Butler
PHOTOGRAPH BY Nitin VadukulI am an ordinary guy." says Usain Bolt. “I used lo party A three times a month but now it is maybe five times a year. I stay away from that. What do 1 do when 1 am not at the track? I play video games quite a lot.” It is approaching midnight as we talk and it has been some evening at the office tor the local boy in the 100 metres at the Jamaican International, one of the first major Grand Prix meetings of the season. When he stood on the start line for what he planned was just a race to gauge how his speed is progressing for his future runs at his favourite distance, the 200m. he could never have imagined what lay ahead. Bolt’s execution out of the blocks was superb and when he crossed the line, the clock flashed up a mesmerizing time of 9.76 seconds.
On a night of perfect sprinting conditions and with a home crowd of more than 12,000 people, his 9.76 sees, was the second fastest time ever in the long history of the Blue Riband event of track and field. Only Asafa Powell, his fellow Jamaican, had run quicker by 0.02 seconds. It was a stunning start to an Olympic summer. (If people were mesmerized with his 9,76 how will they feel when he clocks 9.69 sees.?) By the next time we chat. Bolt has made history. It is 5 p.m.on a Tuesday evening at the start of June and the world’s media
are gathered around waiting to speak to an athlete who was on a speed-trip to New York this time, once more to test his ability for the 200m, the distance at which he has always dreamed of winning the Olympic title.
But on this occasion, when he came out of the other side of the 100m at the Randalls Stadium to the east of Manhattan, he was the World record holder after a perfonnance of staggering power on a track moistened by a climate where the meeting had been delayed by an hour because of the threat of thunder and lightning, never mind this bolt from the blue. Bursting from the blocks, the Jamaican is ahead at 20m and his awkward gait - he is 1.98m - has never looked so smooth. There is no stopping him. The ordinary guy wins in 9.72 to become the quickest man of all time, and the tallest, and, maybe, the quietest too. But it is here where he is not quite alone. Like Powell, who he has just replaced as World record holder, and Tyson Gay, the American World champion he has just beaten in New York, Bolt retlises to speak brashly of predictions. He has created a career on just delivering, slowly progressing to a level where no sprinter has run the 100m so quickly as him.
He is easy with the media because for someone so young, he is a veteran. Bolt is a former lAAF World Junior 200m champion, an athlete who won that title on his home track in Kingston in 2002 when he first showed what a spectacular ftiture lies ahead. He was not even 16 at the time, a Championship age record for the distance. Since joining the senior ranks, he has not had too many headline grabbing moments but progression takes time. He might run fast when the gun goes, but in sprinting, reaching the top does not happen overnight without years of foundation and even though he won silver behind Gay in the 200m at last summer’s IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Osaka, it would be fair to say it went very much unnoticed in the overall picture of the summer. Gay did the doubie while Powell took the World record to 9.74 in Rieti, Italy, in September but when Bolt heard it, he was on the phone to offer him his kindest regards. “We have a very good relationship,” says Bolt. “Asafa called me and told me congratulations. He said “You’ve made things rough on me now”. He is a great athlete and I respect him a lot. We are good friends. I have my World record, so I am happy and enjoying it. 1 am really looking forward to the Olympics.” It is a measure of his progress that Bolt is not even sure if he will run the 100m in Beijing. The 200m has always been his event. He is an outstanding bend runner, coping superbly when the super-charged sprint moves to another level in the home straight and he was the reason why the home fans were climbing the walls of the packed stadium for a glimpse of his races at the
world juniors. He never allowed that occasion to trouble his path towards senior status and now he is the World record holder at 100m, he has no intention of letting fame go to his head. Bolt remains in awe of the coach who has guided him since the autumn of 2004, and if Glen Mills decides it will be only the 200m in Beijing, so be it, “It is my fourth year with Glen and he has made nothing but good decisions,” says Bolt. “If he decides that we are running only the 200m at the Olympics, then I am fme with that because he has his reasons and I am sure they will be good reasons.” It is 40 years in October since American Jim Hines, a former baseball player from Arkansas, broke through the iO-second barrier for the 100m when he won the Olympic title in Mexico in an electronically timed 9.95.
It was a mark which would last 15 years before his fellow countryman Calvin Smith would bring it down to 9.93, leading the way for such names as Carl Lewis, Leroy Burreil, Donovan Bailey - like Hines. securing the landmark victory in the Olympic final in Atlanta with 9.84 - Maurice Greene, Powell and Bolt. who now already has his own place in history. The 100m is not always akin to tall sprinters, but Powell is 1.92m and his Jamaican friend has followed his lead at 1.98m. There have been invitations for Bolt to move to the USA to train but he remains at the University of Technology in Jamaica where he is guided by Mills, the national coach. The World record performance was only the fifth occasion that Bolt has run the 100m at this competitive level - because Mills was not keen on it. It began last year. Mills told him that if he broke the 20üm national record, he could do the 100m. Bolt had no better incentive, stomiing to 19.75 to overtake the mark of legendary Jamaican Don Quarrie, the 1976 Olympic 200m champion and 100m silver medallist, whose time of 19.86 had stood for 36 years. “After the race he didn’t even say thank you, he just said ‘when is the 100’.” Says Mils. He ran 10.03 in Greece for the shorter distance and in 12 months has taken over the worid, but it was not meant to be this way. “We started out the year with the plan that he would be preparing to mn the 200m at the Olympics and he has always had the passion to prove to me that he is a 100m runner,” says Mills. “I said we could achieve both goals.” Often in the shadows, is it just great timing that Bolt has emerged in this fashion so close to Beijing? What has changed? “I have matured more really,” he says. “After winning the silver at the World Championships, I was so near to the goal. I have just changed my attitude a little bit more. I was serious last year but 1 am more serious now because I really want it. 1 have done more training. I have done a great deal of work on my starts and my transitions and I have I” gone to the gym more. “I was very reluctant … I never really liked the gym. From when I was young, 1 didn’t really like weights. When I go there I put my mind to the work, sometimes it is hard and you just want to stop but I try my best at all time.” As he has shown so far this summer, his best has brought spectacular rewards.
Section: JAMAICAN SPRINTERS
After winning Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medals in the 100 meters, sprinters Shelly-Ann Fraser and Usain Bolt returned to a party that is still jumping-from the slums of Kingston to the country roads in Trelawny
MONDAY, SEPT. 15
The sprinter flew into Manley International hours ago, nerves rattled, desperate to sleep. But now she sees the welcoming crowd outside, and her braces shine in the Kingston night; now she’s tunneling into the people, giggling in a black hoodie with a skull and crossbones and the words LOVE KILLS ablaze across her chest. Shelly-Ann Fraser climbs onto a plush convertible, perches atop the trunk like a parade queen as it roars away. A dump truck, loaded with faces from her old neighborhood, pulls up soon after, too late. SHELLY-ANN, says the banner strung across the rear, WATERHOUSE.
The homecoming has begun. They’re filtering back, the heroes of Beijing, the biggest shock of the 2008 Olympic Games. Who saw Jamaica coming? Who saw that this nation of just 2.8 million, the island whose reggae legend, Bob Marley, sang famously, “Let’s get together and feel all right,” would get together with the rest of the world in China and kick its collective tail? Yet that’s what happened night after night in the Bird’s Nest: Jamaica won 11 sprinting medals, six of them gold, three alone on the wings of record-smashing supernova Usain Bolt.
No nation-not nearby Cuba, not even the mighty U.S.-came close to the island’s per capita haul. China expended seven years of blood, sweat and cash to win the 2008 gold medal count, and it came away with a mere 51. If it had won at Jamaica’s rate, China would have 2,785 Olympic champions to brag about.
Still, it’s easy to think Jamaicans could have been happy with just two. As Fraser says, Jamaicans “eat and sleep” sprinting, and there’s no sprint more glamorous than the 100 meters. In Beijing, Fraser and Bolt became the first Jamaican woman and man to win those Olympic titles. It’s a bonus, of course, that between the 21-year-old champions-Fraser from inner-city Kingston in the east, Bolt from country-road Trelawny in the west-Jamaica gets a vivid embodiment of its grim trials and great talent. And it’s a gift for the curious outsider that between Fraser’s return home at one end of the week and Bolt’s at the other, all the national pride, defensiveness, joy and paranoia attending their success will bubble to the surface and pop.
So we stumble out of customs with the rest of the tourists and see the hundreds of fans jamming around the convertible. We see Fraser, hardly fresh off a 20-day post-Olympic whirl through Switzerland, England and Germany, hardly awake after winning the IAAF/VTB Bank Athletics 100-meter final and $30,000 in Stuttgart the day before, so scared of flying that she had white-knuckled her way back without rest. We wander over. Someone mentions a party.
And off we go to Kingston’s Waterhouse district, rolling slowly through the dark, around the man-sized potholes. “This true garrison,” says Ralph the driver. We climb out in the Waterhouse neighborhood known as Moscow. It’s past 9 p.m. A mural livens the wall at the end of Ashoka Road with the words AMAZING! and 10.78 SECONDS on top and Fraser’s luminous face below. An eight-year-old boy lopes past, swigging a bottle of beer. Power lines droop to neck level. Bony dogs lap at the raw sewage along the road. Garrison is the Jamaican term for inner-city areas besieged by internecine violence and dominated by quasi-political, often criminal gang leaders known as dons. Factional warfare in Waterhouse has already claimed more than 30 lives in 2008; word is, the conflict among Moscow, Back Lane and Bush Mouth has accounted for about a dozen of them.
When Shelly-Ann won the 100-meter final in Beijing on Aug. 17, the killing in Waterhouse all but stopped. This is no surprise. In 2002 two-time Olympic silver medalist Juliet Cuthbert found herself facing a gunman in downtown Kingston. “After I realized I had no money to give, I thought, He’s going to kill my ass,” Cuthbert says. “I told him who I was. He put his gun away, gave me back my cellphone and said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you, and times are hard.’ That’s the respect an athlete gets in Jamaica.” During the nine days in August during which Fraser and Bolt led Jamaica to unprecedented Olympic success, the crime rate dropped across the island.
No one is fool enough to predict that the calm in Waterhouse will last. “But at this moment,” says Shelly-Ann’s twentysomething uncle Omar Fraser, “it’s peace, love and happiness.”
More than a thousand people mill about Ashoka Road: Any minute now Shelly-Ann will come home for the first time since Beijing. A bank of 10-foot speakers squats in the center of the street. A makeshift bar sits in front of the Frasers’ tenement. Dancehall tunes rattle and pound; a peanut vendor pedals by, his oven emitting an ear-splitting hiss. A woman with green and gold cords braided into her hair brushes past.
The music stops. Shelly-Ann’s mom, a street vendor named Maxine Simpson, who supported three kids selling underwear, socks and rags, takes up the microphone. She sings, “God is goooood, God is good to me.” One voice from the crowd joins in, then three, then more with each word. They sing, “How could I let Him down? How could I let Him down? So good to me….”
Maxine stops singing. “All hands now,” she commands, calling for prayer. “Father, my Father, I come to you with everything. I thank you for strength, life. Lord, without you, we are nothing. When we have you, we have everything….”
A man pulls up on a bike. “It would make you weep, the things Shelly-Ann went through, but she’s persistent,” he says. “A great example. Plenty more kids want to be like Shelly-Ann.”
Now Maxine is shouting, “Hear me out! I want the future for the kids…. We want them to grow, to come and support the parents. Pick them up so they can walk again in love and Christ. Let them live….”
But the crowd has grown restless. It’s breaking up when a sudden stir can be felt rolling our way, up the middle of Ashoka Road. Heads turn: Fifty feet away, approaching fast, hundreds of bodies are at once falling back from and pushing in on this one small face, trying to clear a path while all of Waterhouse leans in to see. A voice yells, “She coming!”
TUESDAY, SEPT. 16
WHEN BOLT and Fraser won the 100-meter finals, they altered the way Jamaicans regard themselves. Jamaica, a sprinting power since its first Olympics, in 1948, had produced gold medalists such as Arthur Wint and Donald Quarrie, world-record holders such as Asafa Powell and proud warriors such as Herb McKenley, but their achievements seemed perfectly scaled for an island of its size. Prime talents such as Donovan Bailey emigrated and competed for bigger, richer nations. Merlene Ottey, with eight Olympic medals, none of them gold, best embodied the Jamaican track persona: always feared, but doomed to place or show.
Then Bolt struck and Fraser followed, and if they had merely been the first Jamaicans to win the Olympic 100, that would have been plenty. But there was also the matter of style. Fraser romped to the gold in 10.78 seconds, grinning so hard at the finish, leaping and punching the air with such glee, that it seemed she might levitate for her victory lap.
Then again, she had the toughest act in history to follow: The night before, Bolt, gliding in with arms outstretched for the last 30 meters, crushed the field in a world-record time of 9.69, then pulled off his shoes, danced two goofy dances with the Jamaican flag about his neck and pointed his fingers in a pantomime of lightning. Jamaicans named his victory stance “To the World!”
The display provoked a public chiding from Jacques Rogge, but forgive the IOC president his mistake. Steroid busts and a two-decade parade of dour egos would blunt anyone’s ability to recognize … fun. Like Fraser, Bolt was only giving “a Jamaican flavor to what happened,” says Michael Carr, Fraser’s coach at Wolmer’s High School for Girls in Kingston. “Pure passion and joy.”
And it was only the beginning. Fraser led a Jamaican sweep of the 100, and wins by Veronica Campbell-Brown in the 200 and Melaine Walker in the 400-meter hurdles punctuated the best-ever Olympic performance by Jamaican women. Bolt, meanwhile, not only won the 100 but also broke Michael Johnson’s once-unbreakable world record of 19.32 in the 200 and then powered Team Jamaica to gold in a world-record time of 37.10 in the 4 × 100 final. Jamaica, suddenly, was the sprint capital of the world.
Two days later Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding opened his celebratory speech to the country by crying, “What a mighty people we are!” When the video board at Half-Way Tree-Kingston’s Times Square-flashed its lineup of Jamaican heroes, dignified nation builders such as Marcus Garvey, Norman Manley and Paul Bogle were joined by Bolt, shooting his fingers at the sky.
Carr, meanwhile, found his fall program at Wolmer’s swamped. At first none of the new girls wanted to run anything longer than 400 meters; Jamaicans like their races short and straight. “Everybody wants to run the 100,” Carr says. “I had that problem with Shelly: She would not accept running the 400. It’s a sprint, but kids here see it as long distance.”
Practice time: We are sitting just off Wolmer’s dirt track, its lane lines lost in a decade’s growth of grass. More than 80 girls are stretching, sprinting, gasping. The 50-year-old Carr, a onetime disciple of Bolt’s coach, Glen Mills, has been at Wolmer’s for 20 years. Shelly-Ann came to him at 12, renowned for winning primary school races barefoot. An alumna, an elderly woman in New York City, paid the modest fee for her books.
Shelly-Ann called Carr two days after winning in Beijing. It was 3 a.m. in Kingston. “Coach, I did it,” she said softly. Carr didn’t jump as he had when he saw it live on TV, screaming so loudly that he disrupted a church service next door. He didn’t cry as he had then, and he didn’t say that he could well retire now, because what else is there for a Jamaican track coach to do after producing an Olympic champion? “Yes,” Carr murmured. “Yes, my girl.”
WE SHOW up at Kingston’s Courtleigh Hotel early for our afternoon appointment, but Jamaica’s anti-doping czar is already there. Before we have a chance to ask a question, Dr. Herb Elliott asks what has happened to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. “How do you put this Carl Lewis thing in your magazine?” he says. “Carl is not known for his brain power. So how does SPORTS ILLUSTRATED quote this man without [saying] that this man is an idiot?”
It has, for five days now, been the nation’s hottest topic. On Sept. 11 Lewis, a nine-time Olympic gold medalist, voiced to SI.com his suspicions about Bolt’s performance in Beijing and about the integrity of Jamaica’s anti-doping program. He listed six men in history who have run sub-9.8 100s-Ben Johnson, Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery, Tyson Gay, Powell and Bolt-and noted that the first two tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, and the third was banned after being linked to the BALCO scandal. “So when people ask me about Bolt,” Lewis said, “I say he could be the greatest athlete of all time, but for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don’t question that … you’re a fool. Period.”
No Jamaican sprinter tested positive in Beijing. Earlier this year the IAAF placed Jamaica fifth on its list of the 15 countries subjected to the most out-of-competition tests by the federation. But the nation’s lack of a fully funded testing program, as well as its refusal to join the Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organization, sparked summer-long criticism that was further fueled on the eve of the Olympics by the national team’s dismissal of sprinter Julien Dunkley, a relay reserve, for having tested positive at the Olympic trials in June.
In August, Jamaica agreed to set up its own anti-doping program, but that news was drowned out in September by another SI.com report, which found that two sprinters from Jamaica’s 2008 Olympic team, Delloreen Ennis-London and Adrian Findlay, had received shipments of banned performance-enhancing drugs at their U.S. homes as recently as early '07. Both athletes denied using the substances but did not deny receiving the shipments.
Still, these days it’s Lewis who draws the most Jamaican fire. Today’s Jamaica Gleaner contains letters criticizing the former Olympic champion, and the lead editorial in this morning’s Daily Observer, titled POOR CARL LEWIS, dismisses him as mean-spirited and envious. Elliott, 68, a member of the IAAF medical and doping commission as well as the Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA), insists that Jamaica has been serious about nailing drug cheats for the last 13 years. He notes that Powell’s older brother Donovan tested positive for ephedrine in 1995 and that the JAAA nabbed sprinters Patrick Jarrett in 2001 and Steve Mullings in '04. In '08 Elliott adds, Bolt was tested out of competition four times, Powell six and Fraser three. “We have absolutely nothing to hide,” Elliott says.
As if on cue, his cellphone rings: a JAAA official looking to clarify what should be done with Dunkley. “You need to send this man a letter stating that if he doesn’t respond, that you’ll have to hear him in absentia and you’ll sentence him anyhow,” Elliott says into his phone. “Because the IAAF needs to know what we’re doing…. Anyhow, we want to ban him for the two years. The one thing I want to find out about, I understand he had problems in the NCAA before. If that is so, we’ll ban him for life.”
Dunkley competed in the U.S. for East Carolina and won the 2003 NCAA indoor 60-meter championship before being stripped of it for undisclosed reasons. During that time he also worked with expatriate Jamaican coach Trevor Graham, training in the same doping-tainted group as Montgomery and Marion Jones. Graham is now banned from coaching in the U.S.
Elliott was part of the early wave of sprinters who made studying and competing in the U.S. a Jamaican rite of passage. But when Asafa Powell decided in 2001 to attend Kingston’s University of Technology (UTech), that narrative underwent a profound shift. The most prominent Jamaican-born sprinters who have tested positive, going back to Canada’s Johnson in 1988 and Barcelona gold medalist Linford Christie of Great Britain in '99, had worked overseas-innocents, it seems, who came under the influence of corrupt foreign coaches. “I am going to stay in Jamaica,” Powell declared in 2004, “and beat the world naturally.”
Many of the new Jamaican stars-including Bolt, Fraser and Walker-spent the last four years training and studying in Kingston. The island’s Olympic delegation went off to Beijing with a new mind-set. “F-- the Americans,” Elliott says. “That is what we thought. Who the hell are they? We’re better than them.”
Lewis is a perfect target for such invective, and when Elliott is asked what, specifically, he finds so unfair in Lewis’s statements, he begins by calling Lewis “full of s–” and “an imbecile.” But then it hits him that he hasn’t answered the question-and, really, can’t. “Don’t get me wrong,” Elliott says finally. “I don’t trust any of my athletes either.”
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 17
ONCE SEVEN of its runners-Fraser, Powell, Walker, Nesta Carter, Michael Frater, Sherone Simpson and Shericka Williams-won medals in Beijing, the upstart MVP Track & Field Club became the new power in Jamaican sprinting. But when coach Stephen Francis hung out MVP’s shingle at UTech in 2001, none of the top Jamaican talent headed there. “We got the bottom of the barrel,” says Paul Francis, Stephen’s brother and the women’s coach at UTech. “Asafa was no star in high school; Sherone couldn’t win a race. Shelly-Ann? Oh, God. Shelly-Ann would get her ass whipped every single time.”
Finally running in spikes instead of bare feet, Fraser showed promise at Wolmer’s, but she didn’t win much until age 17, when she took a second-tier 100 meters in 11.73 at Champs, Jamaica’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. More than 35,000 fans cram into the National Stadium each spring for these high school championships. But then Shelly-Ann got lazy: She spent the next year eating fast food and fading in race after race. After losing a scholarship offer to Alabama because of poor math scores, she bumped into Paul Francis one night at a KFC. He persuaded her to give UTech a try.
“You can never predict how quickly they will explode into something special,” Francis says. “But if you asked me two years ago, ‘Are you recruiting her because you think she’ll be an Olympic champion?’ I’d have said, ‘Are you crazy?’”
Thunder rumbles; the sun blazes. The tidy UTech campus hasn’t changed much since 2001: The buildings are still low-slung, the track needs mowing, the training rooms are cramped. Francis stands in a parking lot near the track, waiting for Fraser to return from her first day back in class. He knows what track people say: Bolt may have improved by .34 of a second in a year, but he had been considered a mind-blowing talent since age 15. Fraser shaved nearly a half second off her personal best (11.31 to 10.85) from June 2007 to the Jamaican national championships 12 months later-and she was no Bolt.
“There are one of two ways to do this if you want to achieve greatness,” Francis says. “You can either go to the needle or you can work for it.” He mentions MVP’s daily 5 a.m. workouts. He says that from October 2007 on, Shelly-Ann would always be the first there, waiting in the cold and dark, ready to work.
Still, they didn’t want her to run. Who? Some of the public, for sure. The JAAA and the other Jamaican runners, maybe. The fact is, although Fraser had finished second in the island’s 2008 Olympic trials-with the top three finishers supposedly locked in to compete in Beijing-a groundswell rose to remove her from the 100-meter squad. After all, she was relatively unknown and inexperienced, and Campbell-Brown, who had finished fourth at the trials, was the event’s defending world champion, not to mention the 200-meter Olympic gold medalist in 2004. Shouldn’t Jamaica put its greatest foot on the track, instead of this … fluke?
In the weeks before Beijing, Fraser felt that weight bearing down. She considered quitting. But then she’d hear the same voice that motivated her whenever she’d get discouraged with school or with running and ponder leaving Wolmer’s. You do that? the voice said. You’re not a survivor. You’re weak.
She dug in. “I said to all of them, ‘I earned my spot. I trained hard, and I came to the Olympics to win,’” Fraser says. “Every time I’m tired, I said, Shelly, get up. I’m sure my competitors were coming out thinking, Oh, Shelly-Ann Fraser: the girl that nobody wanted to run in this great meet.”
We’re driving through Kingston now, from UTech to Waterhouse, present to past. Thing was, Fraser missed Waterhouse those last two years of high school, when Carr and the principal set her up to live with a family near Wolmer’s. Ashoka Road may have been distracting, but it was hers: Shelly-Ann had shared a bed with her mom and two brothers in that tenement room, and her grandmother lived next door. Some days they didn’t eat. Some days they’d go to shops and beg for credit, a bit of food. Her uncle Corey would later get shot and killed a few streets over, and cousin Dwayne was gunned down three days before his baby was born. But in the months between graduating from Wolmer’s and going to UTech, Shelly-Ann came back anyway, sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother after an argument with her mother. “I love being home,” she says.
A sudden, pelting rain begins, hitting our vehicle like buckshot. The borrowed pickup truck jounces onto Ashoka, past the mounds of gravel and dirt, the pavers and workmen. The first reward for winning gold: The government sent workers to fix Fraser’s street. Hurricane Gustav delayed them a bit, leaving today’s ravaged mudscape. “Trust me, if you saw this before, you would have never gone on it,” Fraser says. “It was awful. It wasn’t a road.”
The block looks different in daytime, bleached out and still. The speakers and bar are gone. The beverage signs have been peeled off the wall outside her family’s yard, revealing a spray-painted declaration of Fraser’s new rank in the garrison hierarchy: SHELLY-ANN, GOLDEN GIRL, it says. MOSCOW ONE DON. “It means she’s the leader,” says a boy drifting over. “For what she’s done.”
Fraser and her mother lead a tour: outdoor toilets, rotted vegetables on the ground, rocks and shards of cinder blocks tossed on the tin roofs to keep the wind out. Shelly’s uncle Omar walks up. Maxine introduces another uncle, skin leathered, nearly incoherent, and now we’re hurrying down Ashoka, heading around the block to an overgrown lot where his house burned down years ago. “Can you write something?” she says. “Can you help?”
Back on Ashoka Road, Omar edges up in a T-shirt reading, ME LOVE ME GANGA. He apologizes for his joint, takes a long drag and says how proud he is that Shelly-Ann wants to open a community center here next year, use the medal to help Waterhouse. The future? “We can only hope for the best,” he says.
Shelly-Ann was never bothered as a kid coming home at night from Wolmer’s; the street boys called her Merlene and let her be. Now a schoolgirl approaches: braids, four years old, so proud of her spotless blue jumper and her new shoes. “Shanneeka Williams,” she whispers when asked her name, then leans down to wipe dust from her Mary Janes.
It’s about then that we wonder what it takes, really, to get out of Waterhouse and run before billions in a stadium halfway around the world. We remember what Fraser said the first night: "I would want Mr. Dope-Man to come test me every day. I want him to test me in the morning, before I train, after I train, because I’m not hiding one thing and I’m not taking anything. I’m a nervous type of person. Whenever I do something bad I’m just going to tell you, because my conscience is going to hurt.
“I can tell you one thing about my teammates: I know we are 100 percent clean. Hard training-we are vomiting. I mean, U.S. athletes are so privileged, they get everything they want. And when it doesn’t work their way, they cry. They don’t understand. We have to do good with what we have here. They have to come here to live it, to see it.”
An engine guns. Shanneeka hops up and down like a piston. “The truck is coming back!” she yelps, until her grandmother finally yells, “Stop that jumping!”
“That’s how Shelly-Ann was,” says another woman, “every day after school.”
THURSDAY, SEPT. 18
WE’RE ON our way out of Kingston, off to see Usain Bolt at the other end of the country, when a sign cuts through the morning blear: CUTHBERT’S FITNESS STUDIO. Ralph jerks the wheel, we slip into the weight room, and yes, there’s the 100- and 200-meter medalist from 1992, showing a client how to work her abs.
A track commentator, member of the JAAA board and a potent voice in Jamaican sprinting, Cuthbert is often held up as Exhibit A by officials warning talent against training in the U.S. In '87, after running for Texas, Cuthbert worked with American coach Chuck DeBus, who, she says, declared that only one top runner-Evelyn Ashford of the U.S.-ran clean, and that Cuthbert had to cheat to win. She left to train alone and returned to Jamaica telling everyone to be careful. In '90 the Athletics Congress banned DeBus from track and field for life for inciting athletes to use banned substances.
Still, Cuthbert isn’t entirely against training in America. After all, Beijing 100-meter silver medalist Kerron Stewart won two NCAA titles for Auburn in 2007. “People are making it out like going [to the U.S.] is the worst thing,” she says. “It’s not. I had fun. But I was able to think for myself.”
Cuthbert never considered Fraser a contender for Beijing. The sudden jump to 10.78? “If Shelly-Ann was from another country,” Cuthbert says, “a bell would go off in my head: Well, what is she doing?” But Cuthbert remembered that Fraser worked with her in '07, cut out KFC and lost five pounds and much body fat in just a month. Cuthbert decided that Shelly-Ann’s coach, Stephen Francis, was too “arrogant” to stoop to drugs.
Cuthbert had also grown up hearing all the biological and cultural speculation about why such a small country has such success in sprinting. Her first impulse is to say the reason is “genetic,” and Bolt appears to agree. His Darwinian “main theory,” he says, is that the descendants of slaves in his part of the island have superior strength and speed. Elliott says it’s simply in the Jamaican character to move fast, “even when chasing women. If you don’t make a conquest early in the night, forget it, man.”
Still, the factors that all agree upon are history, tradition and hunger. In 1910 the establishment of the boys’ high school championship in Kingston began a century of track obsession in Jamaica. Wint and McKenley finished one-two in the '48 Olympic 400 in London and proved that the easiest sport for a poor kid to embrace could actually pay off in education, riches and fame.
Cuthbert has another reason to believe Fraser is clean: the fear of violence. Jamaica, with its gun culture, machetes in many houses, the harsh treatment commonly meted out to homosexuals and others who fly in the face of society, has one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere. Sprinting is so important, some officials suggest, that Bolt would be killed if he tested positive.
Hearing that, Cuthbert doesn’t even blink. “Jamaicans will chop guys,” she says. “They love their sportsmen when they are doing well, and if not? If someone like Bolt should come up [positive]? He probably would have to move.”
WE ARRIVE in Falmouth, capital of the parish of Trelawny, three hours later, legs jellied by the snaking pass that pretends to be a road. We’re still decompressing when Leon (Jacko) Jackson shows up with papers in hand. Jacko, a former junior coach and a friend of the Bolt family, presents them without explanation. But the papers are a clear message for Carl Lewis: a photocopy of a 2003 article detailing Bolt’s year-by-year schoolboy dominance-evidence that his greatness is nothing new.
Frater and the disgraced Mullings grew up in Trelawny. But on our way up to Bolt’s town, Sherwood Content, nine miles away, Jacko confirms that, yes, before Usain the best sprinter to come out of the parish was Ben Johnson, busted for steroids after winning the Olympic 100 in 1988. Johnson’s family immigrated to Canada when he was 15 and always came back to visit. But it took a few years for Ben to come back after Seoul.
“People had mixed feelings,” Jacko says. “Some believe he was tricked, because Ben believed in his coach, Charlie Francis. But Ben wasn’t tricked. It was offered to him, and he took it. He looked like Hulk, his eyes were red and yellow.”
Jacko directs us through Sherwood Content’s leafy downtown, where pavers hustle to finish the street in time for Bolt’s return. Mist rises out of the surrounding hills. We creep along for a few minutes, then stop at a country shop with no sign but a dozen AIDS posters stapled to the outside walls. NUH TEK NUH CHANCE, instructs one. USE A CONDOM EVERY TIME!
Wellesley Bolt, proprietor, visibly sags when he hears who we are. “I don’t see why I should interview with the Americans!” he cries, but then he sits and doesn’t bristle at being asked questions. Carl Lewis, he says, is jealous and wrongheaded. He doesn’t understand raw talent. Before Usain strained at the tape to set the world record in the 200, Wellesley hadn’t ever seen his son dip. His son had never needed to. “And you haven’t seen the best of Bolt yet,” Wellesley says.
A woman walks in. Wellesley rushes behind the counter. He sells garlic and potatoes, spices, chips, assorted meats and things you don’t want to see: cow foot; pig hocks, neck and back; fish head. Another woman steps through the door: He weighs out yams, bags them up.
His son got 10 scholarship offers to run in the States, Wellesley says when he returns. Usain turned them down: Too many Jamaican runners burn out over there, running every weekend. Usain went to UTech briefly, then decided to concentrate on running full time. His dad is worried more about sabotage.
“Sometimes somebody will give you something [tainted with steroids] when you eat,” he says. “I told him, ‘Don’t order room service, go downstairs and get it yourself. You can’t be too careful.’”
FRIDAY, SEPT. 19
DRIVING IN from Kingston, Usain Bolt is running late. To say that about the world’s fastest man seems funny for the first two or three hours. But eventually it wears on the TV crews, the dance troupe, the hotel staff. Everyone grows crabby.
Finally, near 4 p.m., he pulls up. At first it feels all wrong: Music explodes in the lobby, grown women scream, but as Bolt walks up the steps he’s too cool, sunglasses oddly on the back of his head. Five dancers unleash a tribute-a perfectly choreographed reprise of the Nuh Linga and the Gully Creeper, the dances that Bolt performed on the track in Beijing-but his expressionless face gives nothing away. Someone hands him a drink, and three girls rush to hug him. Now an earbud has popped out, he looks annoyed….
And it’s all a sham. Bolt wades into the dancers, pauses and then, with perfect timing, begins writhing and stepping, bent over, arms swinging: a full-on Gully Creeper as the entire rollicking room seems to tilt. Finally he stops and shoots his now-signature point: To the World!
Night after night, in dance halls all over Jamaica, kids are doing Bolt’s steps. A campaign is under way to rename the stadium in nearby Daniel Town after him. Today Bryant Gumbel has flown in for HBO, three reporters from France wait, and next week Bolt will fly to New York City for interviews with David Letterman, Kelly Ripa and Jon Stewart. “I’m just realizing how much I’ve really done for the country,” Bolt says. "I’m bigger than I thought. I wasn’t really expecting this.
“People ask, ‘How can you stay the same?’ But I haven’t changed; I see no reason to. Everybody loves the way I am. I was brought up to have a lot of respect for people. My father is very strict. He brought me up well.”
It’s early, of course. Many athletes like to describe themselves as unaffected, open, but it never lasts. Competition demands ego, ego breeds arrogance, arrogance walks hand in hand with insecurity: There is always something to prove. Money and fame? They change everything. But so far Bolt has remained himself. He stops for every hug and picture, signs every piece of paper waved his way. Lewis’s comments are a different test, but Bolt betrays not a flicker of annoyance. “In a way [Lewis] has a little point, because over the years everybody who runs track, most of the guys, have been on drugs,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter to me, because when you know you’re clean, you don’t worry. I’ve been working really hard. I know I’m clean.”
That Bolt is uniquely gifted has never been in doubt. When he was younger, the 6’5" prodigy won races with his head lolling like a rag doll’s, with a chain and crucifix perched on his upper lip. At 12, he ran a 400 in 52 seconds flat. At 16, already the world junior champion, he ran a 20.25 to win the Champs 200 by a full second; at 17, in 2004, he became the first junior to break the 20-second barrier, in 19.93. Still, until he started training with Glen Mills that year, he was considered lazy and injury-prone. “Champs was easy for me,” Bolt begins, then pauses and starts laughing, “because I was so talented.” He laughs more. “The Olympics weren’t pressure for me either.”
No, somehow it wasn’t. If Asafa Powell is sprinting’s model of introversion and doubt, forever seizing up in the biggest races, Bolt is its easy rider. He was all out there in Beijing: posing and clowning, chatting up volunteers. Free. It wasn’t just his winning that captivated Jamaicans; it was the utter Jamaicanness of his performance. Bolt broke the world record in the 100 while celebrating. He dominated and partied at the same time, combining the national traits of aggression and ease as few athletes ever have.
Transfuse just a bit of that into Powell, and the whole country will be happy. “I talk to him,” Bolt says. “He’s always tense. I tell him, ‘You need to chill. Just swing your arms and let it flow.’ If Asafa just relaxes, he’s going to be great. There’s going to be some running.”
Bolt glances at his watch. This is the third time in the last two minutes, but it’s not a problem; what Bolt does is more interesting than what he says. We ask two more questions, and he tries to answer, but friends from Sherwood Content have driven down, and they’re waiting in the pool: A late-night game of water polo calls. “It’s going to be fun, going back home,” he says. “It gives you a warm feeling going back to where you came from. That’s when you have the most fun in your life: When you’re small and carefree.” Now he’s rushing out the door. Within minutes Bolt is in the water, calling for the ball.
GOING HOME is complicated, though, when you are a national hero, the sudden focus of cameras and note takers. Bolt’s return to Sherwood Content is no longer just a matter of one man walking up the old street to his parents’ house or stopping by his aunt Lilly’s bar. It entails crowds, politicians, media people dedicated to recording the event for posterity. Dozens of strangers trail him. When Bolt notices a buddy poking a long stick at the plum tree across from his boyhood stoop, he legs it across the road.
Three video guys and a photographer hustle to keep up, and somehow Bolt is able to ignore the absurdity of a world now fascinated by his most mundane moves, making the act of taking the stick himself and knocking the plums loose somehow noteworthy. Bolt is actually hungry. He shoves a handful of fruit into his mouth, wiping the juice away. When someone asks breathlessly how often he did that as a kid, Bolt looks mystified. “Every day,” he says.
Earlier Bolt had come upon his primary school, its soggy front yard aswarm with fans, relatives, police and the requisite booming speaker system. He trooped through the mud-the crowd clustered and shifting about him like a swarm of bees-to give away 300 kids’ backpacks, each stuffed with a T-shirt, an exercise book and pencils. His father stood beside him with Jamaica’s education minister, and the prime minister’s wife watched, and then Miss Royal Jamaica 2007 came in, her shoes ruined. Bolt posed for pictures.
Then there are all these family members-cousins, uncles, in-laws, 30 in all, maybe more-who flew in from London, Washington, New York City and Miami, whom Bolt greets and pretends to remember. Some of them are at Lilly’s Bar when he finally arrives, but they can hardly get a word in. Lilly screams at the sight of him and engulfs him in a crushing, tear-stained hug. He goes inside, and the regulars eye him carefully, trying not to make a fuss.
But it’s not so easy anymore: Bolt walks out to his private bus in the fresh damp air, and someone has flicked a switch inside Lilly’s and on comes a catchy calypso beat, Jamaica’s newest redemption song:
Beat your chest 'fore the finish line?
Shouldn't really make a man vexed.
Them can't believe him run so fast,
Till he passed the steroid test.
We arrive at the gate outside William Knibb High near 10 p.m. It’s well into chaos now: cars parked on any patch of roadside, wedged into the slimmest stretch of weeds, the streets streaming with walkers. Even though the event is hours old, a desperate thicket of faces presses to get inside.
“'Ting is free, and people still jumping the fence!” gasps one security guard, but who can blame them? It’s not just the biggest party Falmouth has seen in years. It’s the high school dream come true. Here’s a kid, 22 years old, who left home just three years ago, and now the city, the nation, is coming back here for him: his favorite musicians, massive stars such as Shaggy, the dancehall DJs he shimmied to for years, all of them famous but none so much as he. Young and old scamper down his childhood halls and stairwells, down a hill, onto the playing field out back. Jerk-chicken smoke chuffs from half-barrel roasters. Card and domino sharps lean over tables begging the saps to play.
Now Bolt saunters onstage, wearing a black T-shirt bearing his own pointing image. He dances again, faster, more furiously than he did in the hotel-first matching a cadre of 10 men swagger for swagger, then alone with the woman dancer (green leggings, gold bra) who taught him-delighted with the scene, the music, himself. You can’t imagine Tiger or Kobe letting himself go like this, not ever. The 20,000-plus Jamaicans packed onto Bolt’s turf stand transfixed, screams crashing against the music.
During each pause in the action, though, Bolt does a curious thing. He will be here for hours yet, could hardly want to be anywhere else on earth. But, as at the hotel, he keeps glancing at his watch, almost nervously, the only hint of a high-strung sensibility under that preternatural calm: human after all.
“One Carl Lewis a-wonders why we so fast,” a dancehall king named Tony Matterhorn growls over the loudspeakers. “I guess maybe he’ll come to the islands and meet and greet the Jamaican mothers who make the greatest food in the world!”
He hands the mike to Bolt, who refuses to bite on Lewis, instead speaking only about how you should never forget your roots. Past midnight now, Bolt tries, for the first time since Beijing, to get his Olympic medals to do some good. He says, tentatively, “If you guys in the country don’t act better, then people will still look down on the country….”
The crowd quiets. He’s talking directly to the robbers now, the killers and the politicians who only let things get worse. “You guys try to do better,” he says. “Start to look at yourself. Think before you act. Because Jamaica is a great place. People love coming here, but you have to stop the crime to let them want to come back. A lot of people say, ‘I’m coming to Jamaica, but I’m wondering about the crime.’ I say, Don’t worry about it. Jamaica is wonderful. It’s nice. The vibe is … look at me. I enjoy myself ev-e-ry day.”
Laughter rises from the audience. But Bolt keeps at it, talks about stopping violence, about the need to stay determined and how he’s been beaten or injured but came back to win. “Anything you set your mind to, you can get it,” he says. “So just please, people. Please understand….”
And the words float into the moist air, out over the island’s young and old, and who knows if a sprinter, even this sprinter, can make one bit of difference here. Still, it’s a start, and Bolt does have advantages: fame and speed and that watch on his arm. Maybe he looks at it because he likes what it tells him. He has time.
He says he weighs 210? What’s up with that?
Sev… where is the source of these articles, I enjoyed reading them. Was it runnersworld? It’s good to see what people in the street think about the champions of their nation. thanks…