The 100 Meter Dash

Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Daily News sums up a good deal of what I feel about Usain Bolt's incredible race for history vis a vis Michael Phelps -- not that it is a zero-sum game -- in this column. A sample:

Everybody runs.
Not everybody swims.

It's that simple.

You marvel at Michael Phelps, Mr. Olympics 2008, Mr. Olympics for all time.

You identify with Usain Bolt, the Fastest Man Ever.

Phelps, an American, obliterated records in five solo swims here. His eight gold medals, a probability achieved, made him a safe and simple face with which to brand these Games, the new Mark Spitz. His 14 career golds vaporized the old mark by five.

But not everybody swims. Certainly, not everybody swims well, and virtually nobody swims more than one stroke, maybe two.

But everybody runs.

Bolt, a Jamaican, on Saturday morning ran the most significant race in Olympic history.

He lowered the 100-meter world record he unexpectedly set in May by 0.03 seconds.

Everybody has run. You start when you're about a year old. Eventually, everybody runs 100 yards or meters: in gym class, training for some sport, from parents or the boogeyman.

Because everybody runs, the case can quite easily be made that Usain Bolt categorically won the singular sporting event, running faster than anyone else ever has (without the aid of wind), that every other person on earth with the physical capability has tried. He won the most competitive sporting endeavor there is. He ran the single event that is elemental to nearly all (land-based) sports.

I'm reminded again of a Farleyism I am sure I have shared with you in the past. Dick Farley was the college football hall of fame football coach at Williams. Before he took the head gridiron job, he was the Williams head track coach, and after that he became an assistant with the team, a position he still holds. Farley was legendary for his witticisms, most notably for his bon mots, his "Farleyisms" (so dubbed by us, not by him). My favorite probably was his constant rejoinder to us, and especially to his football players, "you're only here because there is no division 4." One time at a meet at UMass he was coaching me up between triple jumps. The 5000 meter runners were huffing their way through that race and he simply asked me, rhetorically of course, "would any of these guys be doing this if they could run the hundred?" That sums it up in a nutshell.

Bolt From the Blue

It has been buried by the Micheal Phelps juggernaut, but the unfortunate time lag between Beijing and the US, and by dumb programming decisions by NBC, but for all of Phelps' dominance, the single most awesome moment athletically in this Olympics has been Jamaican Usain Bolt's stunning, otherworldly victory in the 100 meter dash. Bolt crushed his own world record, lowering it from 9.72 seconds to 9.69. But more impressive than that is how Bolt did it -- and how he emerged this year.

Bolt, a precocious talent in the 200 pretty much had to beg his coach to be allowed to run the 100. This year is his first year as a competitive 100 meter runner at the world class level, which is to say that Bolt has probably not run the 100 in ten meets. He is 6' 5", which is massive for the dash, and event traditionally dominated by muscular, stocky guys built like NFL running backs. In the race Bolt got out to what was for him a decent start. At his height, and with his inexperience, the blocks are the most precarious moment of the race for Bolt. But by 30 meters he race was over. By 60 the race was a laugher. And by 80 meters Bolt, in the Olympic Finals, was celebrating, posing, igh stepping, and decelerating. And yet he still ran the premier distance in track and field, indeed the gold standard for speed in any sporting context, faster than anyone else had ever run it. Not so long ago I remember the world record in the 100 being Jim Hines' 9.95, a mark that stood from 1968 to 1963 and I remember when that mark stood at 9.93 for some time, from 1983, when Calvin Smith set the mark until Carl Lewis (my vote getter for greatest Olympian ever, by the way) set the clean record (following the ignominy of Ben Johnson) of 9.92. (Here is the progression of the record.) Today we take a sub-10 second hundred for granted, forgetting how ridiculously fast such a race is.

We have entered a new realm in the 100, and perhaps in the 200 if that really is Bolt's better event. Bolt ran a 9.5-something race the other day but the joyousness of winning Olympic gold took over. Michael Phelps' eight golds is awesome, and his world records are undeniable. But the worth of swimming world records seems to have undergone a devaluation in recent months. But Usain Bolt's world record is the single greatest one-event performance in this Olympics, and while not Bob Beamonesque, represents one of the greatest single accomplishments in the history of the Olympics.