Bolt gives athletics welcome boost in Olympic year

Luke Phillips

Usain Bolt gave athletics the boost it so desperately needed when he won an unprecedented Olympic sprint treble in world record times in Beijing.

With former 100m world record holder Tim Montgomery and former five-time Olympic medallist Marion Jones languishing in jail, the Jamaican came into his own at the magnificent “Bird’s Nest” stadium in the Chinese capital.

In front of capacity crowds of almost 90,000, Bolt won gold in the 100m and 200m (in 9.69sec and 19.30sec) and then ran the third leg of Jamaica’s 4x100m relay team, which also set a new world record.

major event

“Everyone will be gunning for me, but that will only push me to do better,” said Bolt, for whom the next major event on the calendar is the World Athletics Championships in Berlin in August 2009.

Bolt and Russia’s polevault queen Yelena Isinbayeva were confirmed as IAAF athletes of the year for 2008.

“He is invincible,” said IAAF president Lamine Diack when asked to describe Bolt, who became the third sprinter in succession to win the best athlete award after compatriot Asafa Powell (2006) and America’s Tyson Gay (2007).

Isinbayeva held the Bird’s Nest stadium enthralled when she defended her Olympic title with a world record 5.05m.

Other athletes to shine were Ethiopian middle-distance stars Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba, who remarkably both won double gold in the men’s and women’s 5000m and 10,000m events.

Kenya’s Pamela Jelimo scooped the Golden League million-dollar jackpot, winning all six 800m races over the season.

The 18-year-old Beijing Games champion, the first ever Kenyan woman to win a track and field Olympic gold, recorded a time of 1min 55.16sec in the wet conditions at the Brussels meeting to take the prize.

high-jumper

It had looked as if former world junior champion would have to share the pot with high-jumper Blanka Vlasic, but the Croatian failed to win her final event in Brussels.

One of the most dramatic scenes in Beijing was the pull-out through injury of home star Liu Xiang, the defending Olympic 110m hurdles champion.

Liu took his place on the blocks for an early morning heat but after a false start, slowly limped off the track, head bowed, to the stunned silence of the crowd.

He underwent surgery in the United States in December to repair his foot injury, and surgeon Tom Clanton, who has also treated Houston Rockets centre Yao Ming, said: “His prognosis for running in the future is quite good.”

Liu’s coach, Sun Haiping, said the 25-year-old former world champion and world record holder would require six months for a full recovery.

relay gold medal

Turning to the darker side of athletics, disgraced former 100m world record holder Tim Montgomery admitted to doping before the 2000 Sydney Olympics, saying he did not deserve his 4x100m relay gold medal.

In an interview with HBO Sports, Montgomery, serving a total of nine years in prison for distributing heroin after a prior four-year sentence in a check fraud scheme, confirmed he took human growth hormone (HGH) and testosterone before Sydney.

The admission could prompt the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to strip gold from the US 4x100m relay, which also included Maurice Greene, Jon Drummond, Bernard Williams, Brian Lewis and Kenneth Brokenburr.

The IOC has already stripped Sydney gold from the entire US men’s 4x400 relay after Antonio Pettigrew admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Marion Jones, Montgomery’s former girlfriend and mother of his son Tim Jnr, was stripped of five medals from the Sydney Olympics after admitting to doping, with a US 4x400 gold and 4x100 bronze vacated because Jones was a dope cheat.

She served six months in a US prison for perjury in the case.

two-year ban

Elsewhere, Greece’s former 400m hurdles Olympic champion Fani Halkia was handed a two-year ban for her positive dope test at the Beijing Games.

The IAAF also banned seven high-profile Russian woman athletes caught switching urine samples in drug tests in 2007.

The athletes banned were middle distance runners Yelena Soboleva, Svetlana Cherkasova, Yulia Fomenko, former double world champion Tatyana Tomashova and Olga Yegorova, hammer thrower Gulfiya Khanafeyeva - a former world champion, and reigning European discus champion Darya Pishchalnikova.

There could even be more positive tests from the Beijing Games following the IOC’s decision to retest doping samples in a search for a new blood-boosting drug known as CERA, which came to light during a test of samples in the Tour de France.

Together with the World Anti-Doping Agency, the IOC are attempting to discover how many of the 4,770 samples given during the Olympic Games should be re-examined.

drug tests

British runner Christine Ohuruogu, who was handed a one-year ban in September 2006 for missing out-of-competition drug tests but came back to win gold in the women’s 400m in Beijing, supported the IOC’s stance.

“If you are a clean athlete you have nothing to worry about,” she said. “Every athlete wants to know they are competing against people who are not cheating.

PARIS, Friday, AFP