Usain Bolt

Usain Bolt claims he was having fun in his record-busting, world-beating runs yesterday, and it sure looked like it to watch him. Beneath the joviality beats the art of a stunningly talented and highly disciplined athlete who has set records and won events at venues as diverse as Kingston (Jamaica), Debrecen (Hungary), London, Lausanne (Switzerland), and more, including, of course, Beijing. At 6’ 5” his long stride gives him a great advantage, and while the usual taller athlete has trouble “recycling” his stride to get his legs moving as quickly as his shorter competitors, Bolt manages to move those giant pins plenty fast, being genetically gifted in that certain special way that has led American runner Darvis Patton, and others, to call him a “freak of nature.”

Maybe being a freak of nature like Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz or Carl Lewis takes something away from achieving miraculous times, but looking at those three it doesn’t seem so. Gifts are what they are, but without the will and discipline to develop them, they lie useless and fallow. As Thomas Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Still, I wonder how being on the track or in the pool with someone whose gifts are so impossibly overarching makes the other competitors feel. Watching Bolt race, including his turning and taunting and gesticulating, and seeing the looks on the faces of those trying to catch him, it is obvious that none of the others gave up, in resigned fashion, to that freakish talent they could not possibly match. They all look intent, focused on their own best efforts to win, and determined to give their all so that they would know they did and one day tell their kids about the experience. Bringing out that indomitable quality of human spirit–that level of real and true competitiveness¬–might just be Usain Bolt’s greatest contribution to these games.