ShareThisPut aside the world citizen stuff and Usain Bolt matters in a way that no athlete has since Muhammad Ali because he makes us uncomfortable with truth (albeit in a different way) and that's very, very good.
Because he's a sprinter, we wonder if he won't go all Ben Johnson on us at some point, so we await the message in the bottle each time out. What are you going to do, eh?
But with Bolt, it's something beyond skepticism because in dispatching the field Sunday in an astonishing 9.58 seconds in the men's 100-meter final in Berlin, he once again was not entirely focused on the finish line.
He looked around, for Pete's sake. And so we are left to be suspicious about whether he can't cut down the world record even more, which makes wondering how he does it and if it's all above board seem a little less worthy of our time.
I mean, he hasn't been caught yet, has he? And with his celebrity and our TMZ, tabloid culture, you'd have to think his secret would have been out by now.
If a minor-league ballplayer like Howie Clark gets outed as a user of performance-enhancing substances ... well, you know. Would a person using something illegal be so cavalier? So quick to draw attention to himself? So willing to make enemies of the white guys who run international athletics? Plus, wouldn't fear of being caught make a person want to run the best-ever time on each occasion, just in case?
We already believe Bolt has fooled if not cheated us by appearing to hold a little bit back in each race. It's a wink of an eye -- an "I know something that you don't" that in its playfulness makes us think not of guys in lab coats -- and in that regard, Bolt is a tease who in an odd way has managed to get many of us to change the list of our questioning to "How fast?" from "How?" It's a subtle change, but one that's important and in some ways liberating, and there is no other world athlete since Muhammad Ali who has been so worth worrying about.
As an aside, convicted steroid user Dwain Chambers finished in 10 seconds flat in the final. Chambers was given a two-year suspension and is still barred for life from competing for Britain in the Olympics but is eligible to run in other international events.
The next step in the evolution of this debate is expediting re-entry for those who have failed tests and maybe that's part of Bolt's allure, too: His public would demand his reinstatement even if the suspicions came to pass.
(Contact Jeff Blair at jblair(at)globeandmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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