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By Garth McLennan, Sports Editor

very once in.a while an athlete
R= along with the ability to truly

revolutionize and rewrite the record
books for his or her sport. For hockey it was
Wayne Gretzky; for golf it is Tiger Woods;
basketball had Michael Jordan, and by all
accounts, track and field appears to have
found their transcendent superstar— Usain
Bolt, the fastest man alive.

Since exploding onto the scene at last
year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, the
Jamaican-born Bolt has completely blown
away the athletics world, and made the
casual sports fan sit up and take notice of
track and field, which is unheard of outside
of the Olympics and steroid scandals.

Like Gretzky, Woods and Jordan, Bolt has
become larger than the sport, and after the
last year he’s had, it’s easy to see why.

At the Olympics in China, Bolt racked
up three gold medals and blew away the
world records in the 4 x 100m relay, the
200m and most importantly, the Cadillac of
sprinting, the 100m. The sports world was
stunned, and Bolt was immediately crowned

 

as the newest Olympic hero.

However, whatever he accomplished
last summer, he made everyone forget about
it with his breathtaking performance at this
year’s World Athletics Championships in
Berlin. Bolt competed in the same three
events and took gold in all of them. It was
in the 100m dash however, that he truly
made history.

Bolt shattered his previous mark of
9.69 seconds by running the 100m in 9.58.
That sort of improvement is unheard of,
and it has fuelled his critics’ claims that
he can’t possibly be running clean. Before
Bolt, whenever the 100m world record fell,
the most it had ever been broken by was
more than 0.07 seconds. Bolt broke his own
record by 0.11 seconds.

Bolt is so fast that he’s been blowing
away the times of known steroid cheats,
such as Ben Johnson and Tim Montgomery.
The fact that he’s only 23, and still several
years away from the typical prime of a
sprinter, makes Bolt’s speed seem even
more inhuman. All of this, combined with
his meteoric rise and unearthly level of
improvement, has led a number of people

to, understandably, believe that chemistry
may be beliind Bolt’s success.

After all, if there has ever been a sport
so widely publicized for its doping scandals,
track and field has to be at or near the top of
the list. With a few rare exceptions, running
has time and time again seen the rise of
track superstars, only to see them crash and
burn in a blaze of disgrace. Ben Johnson,
Carl Lewis, Tim Montgomery, Marian Jones
and Justin Gatlin are the most prominent
among them.

These frequent and repeated examples
of cheating have tainted the sport, and it’s
now almost impossible for any successful
track athlete to be great and escape doping
suspicions. Bolt, unique in so many ways, is
no exception to that.

From all evidence however, I don’t
think that Usain Bolt is doping. Sure, he
may be the fastest man of all time, but so
far, there is zero evidence to suggest that
he’s a cheat, other than the sport’s overall
past. He is one of the most tested athletes on
the planet for performance enhancing drugs,
and he’s never failed a single test. Ever.
Sure, there are those out there who would

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say that he’s on some new fangled designer
drug that can’t be picked up though current
testing, but if you go by that method, you
could say the same thing about any athlete,
in any sport, who breaks records and wins
championships.

The fact is, Bolt is built to be a
sprinter. At 6-5 in a sport usually dominated
by much shorter men, Bolt is naturally
predisposed to succeed. Timers from Berlin
broke down his runs in the 100m dash and
found that over the course of the meet Bolt
took far fewer individual steps than his
closest competitor, Tyson Gay. To go along
with his incredible speed, he covers much
more ground with each step he takes then
everyone else.

More than anything else, though,

I want to believe that Bolt is clean. The
pure fun and joy of sports is ruined if you
always cast athletes in a shadow of doubt.
That doesn’t mean that fans should be naive
and blindly believe whatever they’re told;

it just means that until some semblance

of circumstantial or concrete evidence is
provided, Usain Bolt should be given the
benefit of the doubt.

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