Bolt's so fast he has us feeling dizzy

[Jangle]

Dan Silkstone Berlin
August 22, 2009
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IN PUBS and offices and lounge rooms across Australia and around the world, let the argument begin. Is Usain Bolt the greatest sprinter the world has seen? Is he the greatest runner full stop?
He wants to be, and who could blame him? Normal-sized challenges are fast evaporating for the man who has already claimed two gold medals and two world records at the world championships in Berlin after claiming three of each at the Beijing Olympics.
''I keep telling you guys, my main aim is to become a legend, that's what I'm working on,'' he said after setting a world record of 19.19 seconds on Thursday. ''It's a great feat for me to have broken my world record. I didn't know I was going to break it.''
On the minus side, the great Jamaican has been the dominant force in the sport for only the past two years.
How do you compare that with an athlete such as Carl Lewis, who showed greater versatility over a longer period and combined sprinting and long jump, two very different disciplines? Or Haile Gebrselassie, who has achieved domination and longevity - the two most difficult feats for any sportsman.
On the plus side, everything else.
Bolt is, unquestionably, more dominant than Lewis, who, from time to time, was known to lose. He blows world records away with a regularity and audacity that the great American never consistently managed.
In events previously decided by fractions of fractions of seconds, he wins by more than five metres. He produces his fastest runs on the biggest stages. Bolt's feats here have taken the Jamaican to a level previously unseen in his sport. He does things deemed, until recently, impossible.
It was once thought that Michael Johnson's 19.32 seconds for the 200 metres was a time built to last.
Twice now Bolt has exploded past it. It was thought that humans could not run 100 metres in 9.5 seconds. They can.
On Thursday he said there was no reason why 200 metres could not be run in under 19 seconds.
Previously, he was judged a slow starter; he has worked hard on that weakness. In the 100 metres he got away from the blocks quickly; in the 200 metres he was first out. Achilles minus his Achilles heel is a fearsome proposition.
Today he stands on the cusp of history as the 4 x 100 metres final offers up another gold medal and another record. Unfortunately for him, he needs the assistance of lesser men to get there. ''I am ready for another world record with our relay, but I do not know whether my teammates are,'' he said.

Memo to Michael Frater, Asafa Powell and co, drop the baton at your peril.
As a sprinter Bolt is beyond parallel, but as a man he is fast achieving similar status. In sport, we have known popular nice guys and swaggering showmen; not often have these traits co-existed in one man.
Before winning the 200 metres he entered the stadium wearing a T-shirt that read: Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner). How well do you reckon that went down with a German crowd already swept up in adoration?
Journalists love him because he talks well, smiles big and delivers classic quotes. Crowds love him because he dances, delights and makes all who pay to see him run leave the stadium feeling privileged to have witnessed it. He does not lack for charisma.
American Wallace Spearmon, who captured bronze in the 200 metres, admitted he had entered the race hoping for second place. That is what Bolt does to you. It seems bizarre to already be pondering how history will judge a man who we are still just getting to know. Perhaps most astonishingly of all, he is only 23.
He joked on Thursday that he would like a knighthood. If Nick Faldo can get one, then Queen Elizabeth should just hand it over without further delay. The street outside Berlin's Olympic Stadium is named after Jesse Owens, who won gold in Bolt's three events - as well as the long jump - in 1936. They might as well start building a new one now.
He is not one to rest on the laurels hung repeatedly around his neck these past 12 months or so. He wants to do this, at Olympics and world championships, over and over again.
We can probably say that his is the greatest short stretch of domination ever seen in the sport, that his is the greatest start to a career in living memory.
Then there's that other bar-room argument. Roger Federer isn't what he used to be. Tiger Woods is holding steady and Cristiano Ronaldo is an unlikeable tosser. In that argument, only Bolt is on the rise. As ever, he is moving fast.

[Mosiah]

Today he stands on the cusp of history as the 4 x 100 metres final offers up another gold medal and another record. Unfortunately for him, he needs the assistance of lesser men to get there. ''I am ready for another world record with our relay, but I do not know whether my teammates are,'' he said.

Memo to Michael Frater, Asafa Powell and co, drop the baton at your peril.

[Jangle]

Usain Bolt: What Is He Doing Here On Earth?

Friday, August 21, 2009
Posted By Dave "Large" Larzelere 3:10 PM
Forget gender tests. They need to whip out something a little more sophisticated over at the track and field world championships in Berlin, some test that can ascertain beyond the shadow of a doubt whether Usain Bolt is actually a human being and not some sort of omnipotent space alien. Because I, for one, am getting a little nervous. Tell Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to break out their skinny ties, because I’m having visions of Superman 2 and General Zod flying into the White House. It’s time that we stopped celebrating this “Jamaican” sprinter and instead put together a coalition of our finest diplomats and statesman and cultural leaders to formally pose him the question on all of our minds: “Mr. Usain Bolt, exactly who are you, where are you from, and what is it that you want from us humble earthlings?”


In the video above, Bolt lowers his own 200m world record by .11 seconds to 19.19, just days after he gave the 100 meters the same treatment, lowering his own world record .11 seconds to 9.58. Dropping times at this rate in the sprints is generally the type of thing that happens over the course of decades. Consider that it took the 100-meter world record 13 years to be lowered .11 seconds from Leroy Burrell’s mark of 9.85 in 1994 to Asafa Powell’s 9.74 in 2007. Since then, Bolt has lowered the mark .16 seconds, and three days ago, he dropped it .11 in one race. Then he turns around and pulls the same move on the 200? No no NO, uh uh, no way. It’s come time for me to go all chicken-head over here, and it’s not because I’m calling ‘roids. It’s because I’m calling "space alien."
Sometimes space aliens come to earth with superpowers and wreak all kinds of havoc, or sometimes they devote themselves (after a period of loneliness and soul-searching) to doing good for the sake of the pathetic earthlings that they come to pity even though they are largely incapable of human emotions.
But other times, space aliens arrive here and decide to use their special powers just to, you know, have a good time and kick the crap out of humans in their favorite pastimes and reap all the spoils of their super abilities. Tiger Woods, of course, is a space alien, although he still refuses to admit it. Wayne Gretzky, another known space alien. And then there’s Chocolate Thunder (Earth name: Darryl Dawkins), a confessed space alien who has admitted to me on several occasions that if he’d wanted to he could have worn a lycra suit with his underwear on the outside and fought crime and whatnot, but he’s just a mellower kind of alien than that. He’s from Planet Lovetron, and all they do up there is party and mack and listen to interstellar funk music made by fellow space aliens like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. All Choc wanted to do when he arrived in our system was break backboards and party in the discos all night and slay many hos, and given his superpowers, he was able to do all three of those things with a frightening efficiency. That was good enough for him, and it caused no problem for anyone except for the backboards, which are Chocolate Thunder’s sworn enemy (evidently, on Lovetron, backboards are like rats).
In conclusion, Usain Bolt, I want to tell you something. If all you want to do is keep lowering the men’s sprint records down to previously unthinkable numbers and otherwise hanging out in the discos as you are wont to do and no doubt making many, many, many women very happy with your superliciousness, then yo yo, no autopsy, no foul. But I’m watching you, man. You start exhibiting even the slightest General Zod-like tendencies, I’m telling Tiger and Choc Thunder that we have a problem. At which point, it will be on like Donkey Kong.