His response to all this was to embrace the newly instituted drug-testing protocols that most runners loathed, even though they treated everyone in his sport as a suspect. “I was the only athlete who volunteered blood and urine at any occasion whatsoever,” he recalls. “I think that helped wash away the suspicion. We weren’t avoiding the testers. We didn’t have secret training camps anywhere. Anything they wanted we gave it to them.” Bolt has been similarly co-operative with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Bailey notes approvingly, and appears to be aware of the enormous stakes involved. “At the end of the day, it’s his legacy. If he does something silly, all the wonderful things happening to him now will just come back to haunt him.”
Sadly, Bailey’s approach doesn’t work so well today, as events have exposed serious shortcomings in the anti-doping measures since Bailey left the track. Among its many other revelations, the BALCO scandal showed WADA remains vulnerable to so-called “designer” drugs such as the one used by Jones and Montgomery. Designer steroids are often simple molecular variations of existing ones; they slip past the WADA controls because the machines used to screen urine samples aren’t programmed to recognize them. Yesalis and others urged sports authorities years ago to invest in research aimed at identifying new forms steroids might take. Now, with times falling sharply, speculation has mounted that a new, unidentified substance is out there. In the six years after Maurice Greene of the U.S. ran 9.79 in 1999, the record in the men’s 100 m was reduced only once, by a total of .02 seconds; in the three years since, it has come down six times, for a total of .19 seconds.
At the same time, broad-based testing for human growth hormone (HGH), an anabolic agent thought to help athletes train without injury, has been beset by glitches and delays. WADA claimed last year it had developed a foolproof test for the substance. But it admitted it could not yet test during the off-season, when users are most likely to be taking HGH. Moreover, not all countries’ doping commissions are equipped to collect and store the blood samples necessary to administer it. “Unfortunately,” says Yesalis, “I think it’s business as usual for doping athletes.”
That leaves Bolt with little defence against rumour-mongering, and the whispering is bound to get louder. The young star remains years away from his running prime, with many experts predicting he will push the 100-m and 200-m records down further. If that happens, he will find himself hearing the d-word at practically every meet. “I don’t know what else I can say to prove to people I am clean,” he told reporters in Berlin. “I get tested all the time, I train hard, I am legit. Hopefully, if I keep winning and stay clean the questions will go away one day.”
The good news for Bolt is the surfeit of influential track figures willing to make the case that his accomplishments are, in fact, possible without drugs. One of them is Ralph Mann, the director of sprints and hurdling for USA Track and Field and a world authority on the mechanics of sprinting. For years, says Mann, kinesiologists believed 100-m results were constrained by the relatively small size of the runners, most of whom stand under six feet. That’s because times are governed primarily by the speed with which a runner can churn his legs, or what experts call the turnover rate. As a general rule, explains Mann, smaller men can maintain higher turnover rates than tall ones because lifting their limbs requires less work (women can achieve an even faster churn rate than men, he says, but tend to generate less power).
Then came Bolt, who towers over his opponents at six feet, five inches. Not only can he approximate the turnover rate of his shorter opponents (just under five steps per second), but his maximum stride length of nearly three metres dwarfs those of his rivals. As a result, he covered 100 m in Berlin in just 41 steps, or 3.5 fewer than second-place finisher Tyson Gay. “That’s not just impressive, it’s astounding,” concludes Mann. “I mean, every one of the men on that line is a freak. But every once in a while you’re going to get a genetic freak among freaks—a Tiger Woods or a Michael Jordan in his sport. And we’ve got one in Usain Bolt.”
Bolt has also benefited from advancements in strategy, which have been lowering times across the sport since the late 1990s. No longer do sprinters cycle their legs maniacally in the first 30 m of the race. Instead they conserve energy for a surge near the wire. “When I started doing that, my times dropped dramatically,” recalls Bruny Surin, the former Canadian track star who later went into coaching. “That’s how all these guys are running today, and when I hear people saying it’s not possible to run the times that Usain is running, I’m convinced they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Whether this is sufficient to explain a man whose results belittle even those of known steroid users is yet to be seen. For some, it doesn’t matter. Darren Stefanyshyn, a kinesiology professor with the University of Calgary, believes Bolt has altered the sporting landscape regardless of whether he is ever implicated in doping. Coaches will be casting about for tall men, he predicts, while theorists revise ideas about how fast a human can possibly run. (One such theory, postulated just last month by Dutch researchers, pegged the “ultimate” world record in the 100 m at 9.51 seconds; no word on whether they plan to issue an update.)
Siegel, too, is content to marvel at Bolt’s exploits as seen through the prism of arithmetical projections. According to his calculations, the Jamaican’s performance should hold up for a generation—provided he doesn’t break it himself. But like many ardent fans, Siegel’s enthusiasm is tempered by realism. “I freely admit my projections are based on assumptions,” he says, “and one of them is: there is a hard limit to how fast a human being can run a hundred metres and still be considered a human being.” Near as Siegel can tell, Bolt still fits within those parameters—tall but not unnaturally tall, powerful but not impossibly powerful, fast but not inhumanly fast. Still, it’s early days. If Bolt bests his own times in the coming years, and if he manages to stay clean, people like Siegel will have a good time charting the extremes of human physical performance. If he proves to be juicing, the damage to his sport will be incalculable.
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