Unique 100 promises intrigue

BEIJING – He had a gold signet ring on his right pinky, a silver ring on the middle finger of his left hand and a gold watch that looked like a couple of ingots from Fort Knox went into it on his wrist.

He sat on a stage next to a European pop singing icon, Paolo Nutini, during a press conference last week. His shoe company sponsor, Puma, presented him with a pair of gilt-colored spikes to wear in the Olympics.

Barely three months ago, no one would have imagined Usain Bolt glittering like this.

In less time than it takes you to read this sentence, Usain Bolt went from a young man whom only track fans knew to the sprinter whom the whole world will focus on when the Olympic track and field competition begins Friday morning with the first of four rounds in the 100 meters.

Call it the flash of the dash.

There never has been an Olympics with three men who could flash the credentials of Bolt, fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell and U.S. champion Tyson Gay.

They are the three fastest men in the sport’s history – the world record-holder (Bolt, 9.72 seconds), former world record-holder (Powell, 9.74) and U.S. record holder (Gay, 9.77), who also is the reigning world champion.

Not since 1988, when Carl Lewis met Ben Johnson, has there been an Olympic 100 as anticipated as this.

A sport battered by doping scandals can only hope the outcome is different from 1988, when Canada’s Johnson won in a world record, only to have both the record and gold medal stripped after a positive test for a banned steroid.

Three of the past five 100 champions have tested positive for steroids, although Johnson was the only one to whom it happened during the Olympics. Both Linford Christie of Great Britain (1992) and Justin Gatlin of the United States (2004) were caught later.

Suspicions of doping had not become one of the many plot lines leading up to this Olympic 100 until Powell complained Tuesday that he and his Jamaican teammates had undergone several blood tests since arriving in China.

“The International Olympic Committee has taken very special measures to have a clean Olympics,” Lamine Diack, president of the international track federation (IAAF), said Wednesday. “We are not against this.”

The lack of an independent anti-doping agency in Jamaica has caused concerns that the island’s latest generation of sprint stars has not been tested frequently enough at home.

Such is the state of track and field in the wake of the Balco doping scandal that it is impossible simply to revel in the sudden emergence of the 21-year-old Bolt as the world’s fastest man.

When he clocked 9.72 during a May 31 race in New York, beating not only Gay but Powell’s world record, it added a new dimension to the Olympic 100.

Powell no longer was Jamaica’s only hope to reverse the result of the 2007 worlds. He was heavily favored in that meet but, by his own admission, panicked as Gay closed in on him at 70 meters.

Questions about that performance have dogged Powell since. But the pressure has shifted to Bolt.

“I’m not nervous,” Bolt said. “I feel ready for the crowd, the stadium and the atmosphere.”

Gay has questions of a different sort, about his ability to recover from a hamstring strain that has kept him from racing since pulling up July 5 at the U.S. Olympic trials.

“No Olympic champion in recent memory has done so without any European competition,” noted four-time Olympic sprint medalist Ato Boldon of Trinidad and Tobago, now an NBC commentator.