Is there any title that has been depreciated more than “world’s fastest man”? Once upon a time, back in the heyday of Jesse Owens, “world’s fastest” earned you a ticker-tape parade in New York City. For decades after, it at least earned you the respect of sports fans around the world.
But with the doping scandals that have engulfed so many sprint champions from Ben Johnson to Tim Montgomery to Justin Gatlin—and that’s just the ones who were caught—the “world’s fastest” is now always suspect bordering on presumed guilty. And don’t get me started on world’s fastest woman where the track record is possibly worse and the biggest star in recent years, Marion Jones, is now in prison.
When the showcase event is dirty (with American sprinters especially prominent among the cheats), it drags the entire sport down. As a result track and field is now a minor sport in the United States, well beneath lacrosse though perhaps still bigger than kayaking—and pretty much consigned to the agate type of your favorite sports page. They hold the national indoor championships in my hometown of Boston each year, in a lovely thimble of a community college gym. One more doping scandal and they’ll be able to hold it in my basement.
But every four years at the Olympics, the 100 meter dash is hyped as if it still means something monumental. On Saturday night here, they sold out the Olympic stadium—91,000 folks in the stands—for a program that, besides “world’s fastest”, offered only some preliminary heats, the women’s shot put final and the conclusion of an event, the heptathlon, that only a math PH.D could follow. (Admittedly women’s shot put is one of the host’s stronger track and field events and all three Chinese competitors made it to the final.)
Still, It’s easy to see why we get seduced by the excitement of the 100. There is always high drama and the promise of, in the flash of an eye, a human barrier breaking. This year’s Olympic contenders included three men who in one way or another have laid claim to that once-exalted title—American Tyson Gay, who won the world championship last year, and two Jamaicans, Asafa Powell, the former world recordholder, and Usain Bolt, who at just 21 and as a relative newcomer to the 100 broke Powell’s mark in June. Never before had there been three men in the field who had run in the 9.7 second range. (At the U.S. Olympic Trials, Gay actually ran a 9.68, the fastest 100 in history, but it was wind-aided and, thus, won’t go in the record books.)
Gay bears little resemblance to the strutting, trash-talking sprint kings, caricatures of the modern athlete, who have dominated the race in recent years. He is soft-spoken, polite and not remotely boastful. He admitted to being shocked in the athletes village when Kobe Bryant actually knew who he was and wished him good luck. Gay didn’t guarantee a victory or even a medal, simply saying “I think it’s about who best handles the pressure. I have faith in myself.”
Nor did he spend a lot of time insisting how clean he was. All he said was that he had volunteered for the extended doping testing offered by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and that was the most he could do to convince people that he represented a clean branch of the sport. Perhaps the most conclusive proof of that came Saturday night when Gay, clearly showing the effects of a hamstring injury he suffered at the Olympic Trials, couldn’t break 10 seconds in his semi-final heat and didn’t even make it to the finals.
Still, that doesn’t speak to those who were faster Saturday night. Certainly not to the one who was fastest of all—and all-time to boot. And we Olympic reporters have become a very cynical lot, having been burned so many times by so many sprinters that have parroted the classic refrain: I have never tested positive for drugs. I got fooled big-time in Sydney and again in Athens (as well as a few other places, including Seville and Paris). If I had to choose a theme song for these sprints, it would be The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Yet I probably will. You too. So this stands as my meager protest. I’m going to name the winner—the kid Bolt in world record time of 9.69—but I refuse to make a very big deal out of it. Enough will. But I figure that If I spare you a little caring now, maybe I’ll spare you a whole lot of disappointment down the line.
