Sport
Usain Bolt seeks to repeat ‘living legend’ status at London Olympics
This Olympic cycle, it’s the 22-year-old Blake who is the young newcomer, much the way Bolt was four years ago, when he was 21.
But that’s where Bolt wants the parallels to end.
“I think the tutoring just stopped,” Bolt said after watching his training partner run only seven-hundredths of a second shy of his 200-meter world record.
Four years ago, it was Bolt who tantalized with all that untapped, mysterious potential.
After posting the second-best time ever in the 100 — 9.76 seconds in early May 2008 — Bolt made it clear he would be a presence at a small meet in New York on May 31. On a cool, rain-slickened night on Randall’s Island, just moments before a Jamaican reggae concert on the infield closed out the evening, Bolt ran the 100 meters in 9.72 seconds, breaking countryman Asafa Powell’s world record and routing American Tyson Gay, the favorite coming into the meet.
“Ever since he started, I knew he had the talent to do something great,” said Powell, who watched Bolt develop on the school grounds of their island country. “But when he switched to the 100 meters, and that first race that he ran in Kingston, in ‘08, and he ran 9.76, that’s when I started to say, ‘Hey, that’s the closest anyone has run to my time for years.’ So that’s when I started to look at him different.’”
Indeed, before the record-setting race, Bolt wasn’t even sure if he would run in the 100 at the Olympics; he conceded he’d goaded Mills into allowing him to run the sprint so he could avoid the more arduous work in what many considered his better event, the 400.
Things changed that night.
