Run, Usain, run, but run clean

Usain Bolt is either the Donald Bradman of sprinting, or drugs cheat. I earnestly hope he is the former, but the latter seems far more likely. To explain what I mean by the analogy, let’s flash back 25 years, to Seoul, South Korea, where,  after a decade of negotiating the slippery slope of boycotts, the Olympic Games found their footing again, and scaled a new peak thanks to two of the greatest sprints in history.

On September 24, 1988, Ben Johnson left his competitors so far behind in the men’s 100 meters final that he could afford to raise a victorious arm in his final strides instead of dipping to the tape. The next day, Florence Griffith Joyner obliterated the women’s 100 meters field, beating the silver medallist by almost a third of a second while posting a winning time that has yet to be bettered.

Not long after those triumphs, I and millions of others who had watched the live telecast awestruck, became familiar with the terms ‘anabolic steroid’ and ‘stanozolol’. Ben Johnson at first denied the doping charge, but eventually confessed. And with his confession, the race determining the world’s fastest person, marking a pure and extreme realisation of human potential, lost much of its appeal. Griffith Joyner’s breathtaking pace came under scrutiny, too. She may have passed all tests, but why had she retired hastily after the Games, and how had she managed to increase her speed so significantly in her late twenties, after a decade spent in the second rung?

As time went by, the list of shamed medallists and of the drugs they favoured grew longer: Linford Christie, Maurice Green, Jon Drummond, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones, Nandralone, Methyltestosterone, Norephedrine, EPO. Then, after two decades of trauma, a saviour came out of Jamaica, speedier than Ben Johnson, and more flamboyant than Griffith Joyner. Usain Bolt restored the public’s faith and interest in the discipline, and led a generation of sprinters who seemed as clean as they were fast. But now Jamaica’s Asafa Powell has failed a drug test, and so has the American Tyson Gay.

Gay is the most thoughtful and dignified of athletes. If he could risk infamy so late in his career, with no serious prospect, even with chemical help, of beating Bolt and his young compatriot Yohan Blake, nobody can be above suspicion. Blake himself, by the way, was hauled up for a dodgy blood test while still in his teens. Which leaves Bolt the lone top male runner with no black mark against his name.

Is he really that good? Could any clean runner so comprehensively defeat the best sprinters in the world, all of whom were using performance-enhancing drugs? How far ahead would he be if they ran clean as well?

It’s this gap that evokes the image of Bradman. Consider: millions of youngsters play cricket; a few in each generation bat well enough to play for their school, university, and state. A small percentage of those go on to represent the country, and a tiny fraction of this elite end up with career averages in the highest range. For a hundred years that range has stayed steady at between 50 and 60 runs per innings.

One batsman, though, was so impossibly gifted that he blew past the best of the best, and averaged over 99 across a two decade career: Donald Bradman. So, could Usain Bolt be that kind of once-in-a-century freak? Or is he just the best among a cohort of souped-up runners, all of whom take drugs because everybody else is taking them. Among offenders exposed by a recent round of drug testing are men and women Bolt respected, trained with, and partnered in relays. Could he truly be ignorant of what they were up to away from the track?

Wikipedia has an entry on athletes who’ve failed drug tests, a list that runs into hundreds of names, most of them unknown. They include dozens of Indians who felt it was worth breaking rules and risking a ban to gain a small edge in competition. Despite these infractions, we remain bereft of medals in races featuring the best in the world, so much so that a man who placed just short of the podium in a 400 meter race at the Olympics half a century ago merits a high-budget Bollywood biopic.

An argument can be made, then, that since everybody’s dirty, it doesn’t matter if Usain Bolt is as well. In fact, some go so far as to claim that steroid use should be legalised in acknowledgement of its ubiquitousness. I disagree: legalisation would turn sportspersons into lab rats, and cheating is cheating, even if everybody’s doing it.

So, I retain the fond hope that Bolt is unique, that remains clean in a sport where every single one of his competitors is dirty. I know I’m setting myself up for a new disillusioning blow, a headline that will flash across the Web one day about a suspicious A sample, followed by a round of excuses. A cluster of treasured memories will turn bitter in millions of minds. But I refuse to poison the memory in advance in order to lessen the impact of the news when it arrives. I cling to examples of men who were so much better than the rest of the best, and hope Bolt will go down in history as a Bradman rather than a Lance Armstrong.

The author is an independent journalist and an art critic.