Clean Runnings: So easy to explain, I'm close to believing in Jamaicans
People want to blame drugs. When something like this comes along, something as shocking as Usain Bolt and the rest of the sprints in Beijing, that's what happens. People want to blame drugs. They want to blame steroids. Especially people here in the United States.
Not only did the USA get shut out of the gold in the six sprints at the 2008 Summer Olympics, but those same events were nearly swept by a tiny country in the Caribbean.
Led by the record-shattering Bolt, Jamaicans won the men's and women's 100 and 200, and the men's 400 relay. Had they not screwed up a baton handoff, Jamaicans would have won the women's 400 relay for a clean sweep. Six-for-six. Unprecedented, unless it's the Americans doing it, as we did in 1984 and as we threatened to do six or seven other times in Olympic history.
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| This much is certain: A yam didn't turn Usain Bolt into a sprint super-hero. (US Presswire) |
The United States is finally running clean.
And we see the results.
Running clean, we're decent. We're OK. We won two silvers and two bronzes in those six marquee events. Not bad, but not what we'd grown accustomed to when we had Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones and Florence Griffith Joyner. We're accustomed to gold medals and world records, but in Beijing those belonged mostly to Bolt, to the Jamaicans.
So we're pissed.
Former BALCO head Victor Conte, who knows all about cheating, was allowed to spew his baseless poison in an Olympic diarrhea, sorry, an Olympic diary in the New York Daily News. It's not just Conte, of course. Eyebrows have been raised all over the place, most cleverly by Rick Maese of the Baltimore Sun.
No known evidence exists against the Jamaican medalists, but the circumstantial evidence is daunting. Call it the Barry Bonds Effect: When one athlete, or in Jamaica's case one country, dominates a sport that has long been dominated by cheaters, how can you not be suspicious? Especially when that one country, Jamaica, is smaller than 48 of our 50 states. We have cities with more people than Jamaica's national population of 2.8 million, but they have more great sprinters than us, or any other country in the world? Makes no sense.
But some things don't. Some things never will make sense. How does San Pedro de Macoris, a Dominican Republic town of little more than 200,000, produce so many Major League Baseball players? It happens. That's how.
And in Jamaica, I can see how this particular phenomenon happens -- and how it could happen cleanly. In Jamaica, they sprint. That's one of the things they do. They don't play a lot of football or baseball or basketball. There's soccer, and there's sprinting. Their 100-meter gold medalist on the women's side, Shelly-Ann Fraser, was winning races in her bare feet as a kid. She had no shoes, but she was going to sprint, because that's what they do in Jamaica. They sprint.
Think about all the NFL speed that comes out of warm South Florida. Now go farther south, and take away most of the distractions and diversions available to kids in South Florida. That's Jamaica. Donovan Bailey won the 1996 gold for Canada, but he's Jamaican. Linford Christie won the 1992 gold for England, but he's Jamaican. The most consistently dominant female sprinter ever, Merlene Ottey, is Jamaican.
The winning times by Fraser in the 100 (10.78 seconds) and Veronica Campbell-Brown in the 200 (21.74) both tied for the eighth-fastest times in history. Nothing out of the ordinary there, other than how relatively slow it seems. Olympic champions -- the fastest people in the world -- are supposed to push the envelope, but Fraser and Campbell-Brown barely cracked the top 10. Fraser improved her personal record by 0.07 of a second. Campbell-Brown has been steadily improving her PR since winning the world junior championship in 2000. So does any of that sound suspicious to you? It doesn't sound suspicious to me.
Now then, Usain Bolt. On the surface, he doesn't pass the sniff test. This guy sets the 100 record in 9.69 seconds despite backing off the throttle for the final 20 or 30 meters. In the 200 he runs a 19.30 to beat one of the most unbeatable records in sports, Michael Johnson's 19.32. He runs the fastest leg on the 400 relay team (37.10) that beat the old world record by three-tenths of a second. He does all of it in a matter of days.
Smells fishy, especially when the explanations out of Jamaica are so ridiculous. Team doctor Herb Elliott says Jamaicans like Bolt are faster than everyone else because they have more resolve after their ancestors rebelled so forcefully against slavery. Bolt's father says his son is so fast because of a particular yam grown in his hometown. A yam.
Me, I say Bolt is a deeper look into the future foretold by Carl Lewis, the 1980s American sprint king who was taller than his competition at 6-foot-3 and who used that length to pull away from everyone but cheating Ben Johnson. Bolt is built like Lewis but even bigger at 6-5. He can reach back for a gear nobody has, because nobody has such long pistons. And he's only 22, which means he's at the career stage where he's going to tear huge chunks off his personal best, whatever that is.
So you see, explaining Jamaica's sprint dominance at Beijing is the easy part.
Believing in it ... that's where it gets tricky. I'm close to believing, and in this day and age, close is a lot closer than track deserves.
