BOLT IS BACK!

It was almost as if the gods ordained it. Just prior to the start of the men’s 100-metre heats at the Sainsbury Anniversary Games on Friday it was raining sideways. The pole vault and discus events had to be postponed because the conditions were deemed treacherous, but such is the appeal of one Usain St. Leo Bolt, even the deities wanted to see what he was going to bring, one month before the IAAF World Athletic Championships in Beijing, China.

Track and field is the sport of the gods. It is the purest of all sports and Usain Bolt is its face. But for the last two years, he has been mortal. Injury took its toll and opened the door for the tainted American Justin Gatlin to take centre stage and he grabbed it eagerly. Gatlin has been unbeaten in two years. This year he has proven to be even more difficult to defeat. Times of 9.74, 9.75, 9.75 and 9.78 has seen Gatlin run more sub-9.80-second times in short sequence than any other athlete in history including Bolt, who prefers to leave his really god-like performances for the finals of major championships.

So, weeks after a dreadfully poor performance in New York, Bolt was back on track trying to produce a performance that would tell the world that it was not a given that Gatlin would be crowned champion of the sprints in Beijing this summer. There were reports that Bolt had been training well in the UK. A reported pelvic injury had been sorted by Dr. Hans Wolfhart and Bolt was feeling free to run as fast as Mercury once again and he showed it in the heats. Running alongside American Mike Rodgers, Bolt eased to 9.87s into a -1.2 m/s wind shutting down 15 metres from the tape.

He produced a similar time in the final but it was not a performance that was as well executed. A poor start saw him playing catch up. He caught Mike Rogders (9.90) midway the race and just managed to hold off his fast-finishing countryman Kemar Bailey Cole (9.92) who seemed destined for second and a possible 9.8s until a hamstring cramp slowed him 10 metres from the tape.

The crowd cheered in delight for Bolt whose return to form has been welcomed similar to how a man dying of thirst would react after stumbling upon an oasis. The fear of purists that the twice-tainted Gatlin would be crowned king this summer was a little too much to stomach. Suddenly that ‘certain’ gold for Gatlin doesn’t seem like such a done deal anymore because, as Steve Cram announced with much glee after Bolt blasted through the finish line, “Bolt is back to winning ways, back to where he belongs, back on top of the pile.”

Bolt is clearly in shape to run 9.7s or faster now. With a month to go, he could return to the track no longer human but the god of track he was ordained to be.