The fastest show on earth

Like a few billion other people worldwide I have been watching the antics of Usain Bolt with slack-jawed amazement at the World Athletics Championships.  You have to hope he isn’t too good to be true – because ever a sport needed a shining new light to transcend the sport – it is athletics.

 

The reason why Athletics has been sidelined from the global media spotlight was all-too obvious the next day when the women’s 100 meters was won by a fleet-footed Jamaican lady.  Unlike Bolt, she didn’t shatter the world record.  But that was no surprise really. Like everybody else for over 20 years – she didn’t even come close to a world record that may be forever out of reach..

 

It seems strange indeed that  year by year the men’s 100 metres record has been inching ever downward – until Usain Bolt blasted into a stratospheric timescale that would not have seemed human even 18 months ago.  Yet the women’s 100 metre has remained stuck on 10.49 seconds since 1989.

 

You have to suspect that if the record had been posted by a drugged up East German Fraulein or a Chinese athlete, then it might have quietly disappeared.  But the glamorous Flo Jo was as American as apple pie and the record was set in the US Olympic trials.  There has long been more than a whiff of controversy about this time… and her equally unassailable two hundred meters landmark set at the subsequent Olympics. Was the wind-meter functioning as it was allegedly rather breezy that day.  And more importantly was she drugged up to the eyeballs?

 

Who knows?  At the time she was a global phenomenon, as famous for her lacquered talons and exotic taste in running gear as she was for her fleet-footed running which took women’s sprinting into another era.

 

Except that it didn’t.  The only athlete who seems to have close in recent years was Marion Jones.  And she appears to have had some pharmaceutical assistance along the way too.

 

Aside from the unproven innuendo, why is there such a big disparity between women’s and men’s sprinting in the last 40 years?  The cynical amongst us would point out that there is much more that drugs can achieve in the female form than they can in the male form, which is pretty powerful already.  There is probably much to be said for that theory.

 

And so we sit back and marvel at what Usain Bolt is achieving – quietly hoping that his efforts won’t be questioned in the future like those of Flo-Jo’s which seem every bit as astonishing today as they did 20 years go.