POSTED: June 16th 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Gay offers a key clue to challenge ahead for Bolt

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Jun 16: Tyson Gay told the British press last week that he was 75pc of the physical shape he wanted to be by the world championships in August; Steve Mullings, who trains with the same group and under the same coach, put Gay at 70pc of his peak.

Nonsense, of course. Gay has run 100 metres 9.79sec this year. Another 25 to 30pc and by August he would be in a position to run 100m metres in the low seven seconds.

He won’t. No human of the present generation, nor probably of any future generation, will run that fast. Gay and Mullings exaggerated to make a point. At best they will run one or two per cent faster at the world championships.

Even that is conditional on everything working out for them because one or two per cent is the catch. Athletes so close to the limit of human ability are traversing a fine line. One per cent more effort may not yield a comparative reward in time because it injures them.

Bolt has started this year more slowly than those of us who stand and cheer would wish. We ask whether two runs of 9.91sec suggests a man who has run 9.58 is in decline.

We forget how breathtakingly extraordinary 9.58sec was when he ran it in Berlin two years ago.  Almost beyond belief, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime feat for Bolt.

He has since been suffering a succession of injuries. So has Gay since he chased Bolt to a new US record in the world championships in Berlin, and he struggles still with a problem in his right hip.

Injury time

As time goes on those niggles will become more commonplace, not only because of natural ageing but because of the length of time they have been pushing themselves close to the limit.  “I have been running
fast for a while, about six years doing 9.8s, and that means a lot of pounding of the body,” said Gay.

Writing a book with world decathlon record breaker Daley Thompson years ago, I remember him saying how he had almost no athletic-related injuries in his first 10 years at the top. Beyond that a season did not pass without something wrong. The same, surely, is true of marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe.

Extraordinary performances are rare or they would not be
extraordinary. Often they come in a single purple patch when an athlete reaches a peak before the pounding catches up.

Perhaps when 9.58sec is surpassed it will be a different
Jamaican who does it, one whose body has yet to suffer the pounding. Perhaps we saw the man this month in Nickel Ashmeade who ran 9.96sec aged 21.

Bolt may not be in decline yet but we may have seen the best of him.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books

Keywords · Neil Wilson · Gay · Bolt

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