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Usain Bolt and Saving Track and Field

August 5th, 2012 · No Comments · Basketball, Beijing Olympics, London 2012, Olympics, soccer, Sports Journalism

You hear this, now and then. And I did the other day on BBC. Or maybe it was Al Jazeera, here in the Gulf.

That Usain Bolt, sprinter from Jamaica, “saved” track and field.

Perhaps kept it from going extinct? Is that what “saved” means?

Which is silly, of course.

Track and field now is right where it was when Bolt ran in his first Olympics, in 2008:

Going great guns, at the Summer Games. Not doing nearly as well the rest of the time.

I’ve been to 14 Olympics (eight Summer), and as much as I like many of the sports there, from gymnastics to boxing to wrestling to soccer to basketball, the track meet is still the heart of the program. Just as it was before Usain Bolt, and just as it will be afterward.

Without question, the man makes the sprints destination TV, but only those with short memories fail to remember the men’s Olympic 100 has always been destination viewing.

Bolt set an Olympic record in the 100 tonight, needing only 9.63 seconds as he pulled away from the fastest 100m field ever assembled. An impressive victory, and one that wiped out doubts/concerns about his condition after he lost both the 100 and 200, to Yohan Blake, in Jamaican Olympic qualifying.

But I kept right on watching (at 1 a.m.) when the Hungarian won the hammer throw, and I had been watching for hours earlier, when Oscar Pistorius was eliminated in the 400m semis, and when Sonya Richards-Ross won the women’s 400, and when a Kenyan won the steeplechase, as usual.

I will watch any Olympic track meet. Any.

(I also have several times suggested that one of the great events in all of sports is a track-and-field dual meet, which we so rarely see anymore. So much is going on, it makes your head spin … and try covering one, as a journalist, on the prep or college level.)

Track remains a niche sport in any year that isn’t an Olympic year. It just is. The Euros keep after it pretty well, but it’s somewhere far, far, far behind soccer or Formula One. But the sport is nearly invisible in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world.

Aside from the final 10 days of a Summer Olympics.

Usain Bolt is a showman, and interesting to talk about. But I was talking about Valeriy Borzov once upon a time, and Carl Lewis and Evelyn Ashford, and to this day I will always stop what I am doing to see the old black-and-white footage of Jesse Owens running the 100 at Berlin 1936.

I will never miss an Olympics track meet — not just the 100 — as long as I have anything to say about it.

Track was the heart of the Olympics before Bolt — the citius, altius, fortius of it — and will be long after he is gone.

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