The Athletics Thread (... but predominantly about Bolt)

[Neil Young]

It would be appreciated if people would not post animal pics outside Chat Chat Chat unless in spoiler tags.

[Scratch]

http://icanhascheezburger.wordpress....ng-chicken.jpg

It would be appreciated if people would not post animal pics outside Chat Chat Chat unless in spoiler tags.

[Reece]

Cocks




(see what I did there?)

[-V-]

Can't blame the guy, he knows that no matter how hard he tries he can't beat Bolt. He could run the race of his life and it would be for nothing

[Neil Young]

He's a phenomenon - twenty years ahead of his time.

From man to superman ... Usain Bolt raises the pace of change

• Bolt's 100m record is 20 years early, experts say
• Giant sprinter may be harbinger of future greats

* Owen Gibson, sports news correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 August 2009 21.27 BST


Seventeen years passed between Carl Lewis running the 100m in 9.86 seconds in 1991 and Usain Bolt going .14sec faster in May 2008, but the Jamaican sprinter's jaw–dropping performance on Sunday night has now reduced the record by a similar amount in just 15 months.

Bolt's performances at last year's Beijing Olympics had statisticians reaching for their calculators after his time of 9.69sec blew to pieces a model that had predicted with reasonable accuracy the progress of ever faster times in the 100m for nearly 100 years. Under that model, no one was due to run as fast as Bolt until 2030.

Following his latest world record breaking performance – 9.58 in Berlin's World Championships this week, achieved despite a car accident and after claiming to be just 85% fit – they might as well throw the model away altogether.

It was the biggest reduction in the record since electronic timing was introduced in 1968, when Jim Hines ran 9.95 at 1968 Mexico City Olympics and it took 28 years for Donovan Bailey to shave another .11 seconds from the record.

Further back, there had been a 20 year gap between Jesse Owens running the 100m in 10.2 in 1936, and William Williams shaving off a tenth of a second. In the same stadium as Owens' 1936 victory, Bolt clocked an average 44.72 km/hour between 60m and 80m.

Academics hailed his rare combination of stature, speed and power as a "one off" that may never be repeated. Just 12 months since Bolt, in his words, "blew the world's mind" in Beijing, he has again redefined the debate about how fast human beings will be able to run.

Dr Richard Ferguson, a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at Loughborough University, said Bolt's 6' 5" frame was the key to his success, allowing him to cover the 100m in between 40 and 41 strides when his competitors take 45 to 48.

"He's a good five to six inches taller than his competitors," he said. "His muscles will be slightly longer. If you have longer legs then you have longer muscles, which can generate more speed and more velocity." Taller athletes have historically been considered less suited to short sprints because they have fewer of the "fast twitch" muscle fibres that provide explosive speed, and find it harder to achieve a fast start out of the blocks. But Bolt has upset conventional coaching wisdom.

Ferguson said it was hard to separate physiological reasons from advances in nutrition, technology and training when attempting to explain why sprinters had got so much faster, so much more quickly, in recent years.

"It could be that he has a few more of those fast twitch muscles, but it's unlikely that he would have so many more than Tyson Gay, for example," he said. "He's tall but he's powerful too. He's something of a one off. I don't think we'll see anyone like him for a very long time."

Research showing athletes were getting taller and heavier faster than the rest of the population also suggested Bolt's height was a key factor.

In a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology last month, Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University in the US, showed that elite sprinters had grown by 6.4 inches over the last century, while the population as a whole had grown 2 inches. Bolt is 11 inches taller than Eddie Tolan, the record holder in 1929.

Bolt has the hopes of an entire sport resting on his shoulders. Yet if he's feeling the pressure, he's hiding it well. The International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, said last week that TV ratings for the Beijing games showed younger people returning to the sport.

But athletics' world governing body, the IAAF, the organiser of this week's championships, recognises there is a big job to do to re-engage a global audience. Bolt will be a key asset when it launches the Diamond League series of domestic meetings next year, an athletics "Champions League" designed to give more coherence to the sport outside major championships.

As for how much faster Bolt can go, experts have given up trying to answer. His coach, Glen Mills, predicted after the Olympics that he could run 9.54 and was almost proved right. On Sunday night, Bolt commented: "I said anything could happen and it did. I'm happy with myself. Now I plan to do even better." 9.4 was the next goal, he said. Attention will now turn to whether Bolt can repeat his Beijing achievement and triumph in the 200m as well, the heats for which begin on Tuesday . "It's going to be fun," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009...-record-berlin

[Guest]

Bolt can't outrun the sceptics

* By Mike Hurst
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* August 18, 2009 12:00AM

THE more outrageous the performance, the wider the gap between public acceptance and suspicion. That's the problem facing young Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, a winner on the track who may yet become a victim of his own success.

Belief is an act of faith. Watching Bolt, 22, win the world championship 100m final in Berlin yesterday in a time of 9.58sec - the third world record of his career - demands that we suspend our disbelief.

There is no suggestion that Bolt has had anything to do with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).

But when Canada's drug-fuelled Ben Johnson crushed Carl Lewis to win the Seoul Olympics 100m 21 years ago, he ran a time experts said seemed "too good to be true" - yet with his discredited time of 9.79sec Johnson would have finished 2m behind Bolt.

It is doubtful human genetics has advanced that much in a couple of decades, nor has the science of sprint coaching, although track technology has progressed and the Germans boasted they had invented a surface that was uniquely both soft and fast.

A Bolt from the blue German track indeed, if the technology can explain this quantum leap in performance.

At a towering 196cm, Bolt is the tallest man ever to hold a sprint world record. Last year he became the first man to win the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay all in world record time at an Olympic Games.

Clearly then, the world has never seen anyone like Bolt who was born and raised in the poverty of Trelawny parish in the Jamaican countryside where children gather at the village tap to fill buckets with water, where there are no street lights.

"Usain's three gold medals (in the Beijing Olympics) brought us running water. Now we are praying for another gold medal to fix up the roads," said an old woman in the village. In fact the water supply is intermittent, at best.

It is a classic rags-to-riches tale. Earlier this year Bolt's appearance fee was listed at $250,000. That price tag will not be reduced following Berlin.

In fact, his greatest performance may be yet to come.

One elite sprinter who has watched some of Bolt's training sessions believes he will run no slower than 18.95sec for the 200m and estimates based on his 100m time suggest a time as good as 18.68. Bolt set the world record at 19.30, taking down Michael Johnson's Atlanta Olympic time of 19.32 which had been considered the greatest of all track records.



Now we will be surprised only if Bolt does not break 19sec.

So Bolt is rich now and phenomenally fast, yet still he can't outrun those questions which surfaced again just a fortnight ago when five of his fellow Jamaican sprinters tested positive for an obscure stimulant, methylhexaneamine.

This drug was patented in 1944 and had not been seen by the World Anti-Doping Agency labs until it popped up in a food supplement marketed as Geranamine by Patrick Arnold, an Illinois chemist and bodybuilder who created the "designer steroids" at the dark heart of the recent BALCO sports drug scandal which landed Sydney Olympic sprints queen Marion Jones in jail. Unlike Ben Johnson, Jones never failed a drug test.

Two of the five Jamaican national team sprinters who tested positive were in Bolt's training group.

The Jamaican Amateur Athletics Association last week dropped the charges against all five, but on the same day tried to ban at least five of their "clean" Beijing medallists from a group, MVP, which did not attend a training camp in Nuremburg.

MVP head coach Steven Francis does not get on with the JAAA. Neither, it appears, does the International Association of Athletics Federations which will appeal against the dismissal of the doping charges on the one hand and then insist the MVP stars - including yesterday's 100m bronze medallist Asafa Powell and women's Olympic 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser - be permitted to run in Berlin.

It is a bizarre situation, one which also forced the IAAF to issue a statement that the MVP squad had fully complied with their commitments under what is termed the "whereabouts" contract which enables the IAAF to drug test any athlete any day, anywhere in the world.

But just how effective is drug testing anyway when there is still no test in use for human growth hormone, one of the most powerful bodybuilders.

The word out of Berlin last night was that the PED of the day is SARMS (selective androgen receptor modulation). The most popular version is Ostarine which has the body building qualities of an anabolic steroid but does not touch the athlete's endocrine profile and is thereby undetectable in current tests.

The sooner the World Anti-Doping Agency closes that door the better, if only so those of us close to the sport can marvel at the achievements of its champions with admiration rather than suspicion.

[Scratch]

All the talk of Bolt, but what about that poor South African woman who is being forced to undergo a gender test to prove that she is female...800m winner.

[knockers]

To be fair she does look like a bloke.

[The Erectile Banana]

She does in fairness but she shouldn't be penalised just because she's ugly.

There's no way she would have been allowed get this far if she really was a bloke.

When's the 200M final on?

[badpiggy]

7.35 this evening

[The Erectile Banana]

7.35 this evening

Cheers Mr. Piggy.

[Gaz]

Time for the 200m final, sub 19 second time coming I think

[DannyMan2006]

Here we go.............

[DannyMan2006]

19.30 to beat.

[DannyMan2006]

19.20............

Not sub 19 yet