[BretLudwig]

Jamaican breaks 100m dash record

"Usain Bolt, a young 6'-5" Jamaican got a perfect start and with a
helping tailwind just under the legal limit, set a new world's record in
the men's 100 meter dash over the weekend at 9.72 seconds. It's the 14th
time the world record has been set or equaled since electronic timing was
introduced at the 1968 Olympics (all by men of West African descent, of
course).

West Indians appear to be increasingly dominating sprinting, as African
Americans lose interest in a sport that was very good to them in the 20th
century. Between the Wars, black colleges switched from baseball to track
as their big spring sport because tracks' results were objective.
Grambling wasn't allowed to play LSU in baseball (or anything else), but
Grambling sprinters could compete with LSU sprinters in the newspapers
when their times were published.

But African Americans have been concentrating on just football and
basketball in recent decades, with anything else considered fit only for
athletes of dubious masculinity who don't like contact sports, such as
Carl Lewis.

Track and field could use a decade or so without any new world records. In
the women's 100m, nobody has come close to the late Florence
Griffith-Joyner's 10.49 seconds in the 100m and 21.34 in the 200m in 20
years, which is a good thing.
I suppose this new Jamaican could be the real deal. Bolt is ridiculously
tall for a 100m man at 6'-5", which normally interferes with starts, so
he's previously specialized in the 200m where his long stride has time to
prevail. But if he nails a start now and then, he might really be this
good, kind of like John Daly in golf, who is a double-jointed behemoth.

Or he just might be juiced to the gills.

You can usually get an idea by looking to see if the upper body is
ridiculously over-developed. But there aren't that many pictures of Bolt
online yet and he seems to wear a rather non-form-fitting jersey, so it's
hard to tell. Lots of juicehead sprinters make it easy for you to guess by
wearing skimpy jerseys and frequently stripping them off in front of
cameras to reveal their Mr. Universe torsos. (Here's 2004 200m Olympic
gold medalist Shawn Crawford, who has never failed a drug test, but still
....) In contrast, after Barry Bonds started hitting the juice in 1999, he
always wore rather shapeless long-sleeved jerseys buttoned to the neck.
Barry is a jerk, but he's not stupid.

In 2004, 18-year-old Allyson Felix from LA, then a slip of a girl with no
arm muscle definition at all, ran a ladylike 22.18 in the 200 meters for a
silver medal at the Athens Olympics. That was cheering. I could envision
her running similar times for three more Olympics and winning a bundle of
medals without any suspicion of doping. She's a fine young lady, who just
graduated from USC a couple of weeks ago despite not having a track
scholarship because she's been running professionally for four years.

But in 2007, Felix ran a 21.81, the only time 22 seconds has been broken
by a woman since it was done in 2000 by Marion Jones, who is now in
prison. Women ran 200m in under 22 seconds 78 times from 1979 through
2000, but only Felix has done it in the last 7 years. Felix now has got
more muscular arms, although hardly in the class of, say, Gail Devers in
the old days. I'd feel better about her if she wasn't from LA, where a lot
of bad stuff involving sprinters and doping has happened, and hadn't left
her old coach Patt Connolly (coach of Evelyn Ashford, sometimes said to be
the fastest clean women ever) for Flo-Jo's old coach Bobby Kersee.

The men's 200m times show more progression, although hopefully nobody will
threaten Michael Johnson's 19.32 at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Women's
running was just hit harder by synthetic male hormones up through 2000
because women get a bigger bang for their buck from them.

By the way, the 1993 and 1997 Chinese National Games were festivals of
doping with lots of silly women's world records being set. The official
website of the Chinese Olympic Committee still boasts: "At the Games, five
of its runners surpassed the world records in the 1500m, 3000m and 10000m
on 13 occasions." Yeah, sure. That was another reason I didn't understand
why the Olympics were given to Beijing instead of Paris.

And the Chinese really want to win the most gold medals in Beijing in
2008. I imagine they don't want to disgrace themselves at home either by
getting caught.

So, will the Chinese do the right thing or do the wrong thing?"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/06/j...sh-record.html


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