Usain Bolt: a Duck?
Fastest sprinter ever. Nine out of nine possible gold medals across three Olympic Games. A never-ending list of sponsorship deals and a charming smile. Usain Bolt is a phenom. He is the greatest sprinter of all time, but could he be the greatest cheater of all time?
Usain Bolt became an overnight sensation when he broke the 100 metre World Record at the Beijing Olympics. But his enormous potential had been known for many years before that.
He was a huge sprint talent already in 2002. When he competed at the 2002 World Junior Championships in Athletics, he was already 1.95 metres tall. That's as tall as he got. Winning the 200 metre race, Usain Bolt became the youngest ever Junior World Champion. He was 15.
The next five years were filled with the improvements, disappointments and injuries that young athletes face when they transition from Junior to Senior athletes. He established himself as a top quality sprinter along the way, and started preparing for the sprint season that would culminate in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
In July of 2007, Usain Bolt participated in a meeting in Crete, Greece. Bolt wins the 100 metres sprint and sets a new personal record of 10.03 seconds. A good, though unremarkable, time for a young sprinter. 10 months pass before he competes again. This time at an invitational event in Kingston, Jamaica. Usain Bolt crushes the opposition, and crushes his own personal best by 3%! An unbelievable improvement in such a short time.
His new personal best is 9.76, making his time the second fastest ever recorded in the 100 metres. Just 28 days later, he runs the Reebok Grand Prix in New York City, and sets a new World Record: 9.72 seconds. He is still only 21 years old, and this is only his fifth 100 metre run as a senior athlete.
In those 10 months, Usain Bolt went from a talented, young sprinter who could win some races, but couldn’t run below 10 seconds, to setting a World Record of 9.72 seconds. An extremely quick rise to the top.
Lightning Bolt
Of course, we all know what happens in Beijing later that year. Bolt wins and sets a World Record of 9.69 with his shoes untied. Professors of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo calculate that he could have finished the race at 9.52 if he had not slowed down to celebrate.
Nobody is close to Bolt as he sets a new World Record in Beijing.
Image source: Medium.com.
In 2009, Usain Bolt improves his own World Record while competing at the World Championships in Berlin. The new record is 9.58 seconds. An improvement of 0.11 seconds from the previous World Record, it is the biggest ever improvement of the World Record since the beginning of electronic timekeeping in 1977. The record still stands today.
Of course, Bolt goes on to win three gold medals at both the London and Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Other notable victories including the 2013 World Championships and winning the 4x100 metre relay at the 2014 Commonwealth Games while recovering from a hamstring injury.
The greatest of all time
How do we summarise Usain Bolt, then? He is the best sprinter of all time. World Record holder and winner of the 100 metre, 200 metre and 4x100 metre sprint gold medals at three consecutive Olympics, although the 4x100 metre gold medal from Beijing was stripped from the team due to Nesta Carter failing a re-test eight years later.
Usain Bolt is so superior to his competitors, in fact, that he is the only sprinter in the top 10 fastest sprinters of all time who hasn’t tested positive for doping. Of the 30 fastest 100 m times ever, only nine are achieved by a "clean" athlete - and all of those were run by Usain Bolt.
Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash.
Doesn’t it all sound a little strange? In essence, two options exist here.
Number one: Usain Bolt is an absurdly gifted athlete, and is so incredible that for close to a decade, he completely dominated other sprinters that were using performance enhancing drugs. He’s so good that his natural ability can overcome the most powerful doping protocols in the world.
Number two: Usain Bolt is an absurdly gifted athlete, and is so incredible that for close to a decade, he completely dominated other sprinters that were using performance enhancing drugs because he was also using performance enhancing drugs.
Remember, doping doesn’t make athletes good, it makes good athletes great. The sprinters that Usain Bolt dominated are not average people with access to drugs. They themselves are already in the top 0.1% of the most genetically gifted people in the world. And they’ve been training their whole lives for these events. And they’re on drugs. Yet they are no match for Mr. Bolt, who has never failed a drug test.
The duck test
“The duck test” is a common expression that goes like this:
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Let’s apply the duck test to Usain Bolt. Not only does he sprint as if he has been doping, he outperforms every other sprinter on the planet, most of whom have been caught doping.
Look at Lance Armstrong for a comparison with another dominant athlete in a very physically demanding sport. Lance Armstrong made huge improvements in short periods of time after beating cancer. He won everything and he set unbeatable records while his competitors failed drug tests. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
It took a long time to catch Lance Armstrong. I'm not saying that Usain Bolt will be caught or that he was doping.
But he sure looks, swims and quacks an awful lot like a duck.
