dbandre - 02 June 2008 02:19 AM
Maturation will only take you so far since their are limits to human performance, maturation at least in the biological sense of Bolt at 15 was that of a near fully matured adult body. What disturbs me is the lack of skepticism over a performance improvement like this. His improvements should be small and not large. The technical differences in the 200m start and the 100m start relate mainly to curve running. Bolt has never been slow out of the blocks even with his long levers. Working on his start makes him .31s faster over 100m??? For the 2 previous years he ran 10.03s for 100m in each of his 3 100m races during that time. If I am not mistaken the back half of his 200m races have only been run in 9.7s and now he’s doing it from a start? The best part of his WR means he’ll will be tested if he wants it ratified and that will give investigators a start to a longitudinal history of biological markers which CAS has recently upheld using to provide a non-analytical positive in absence of a positive test.
1. When training for the 200/400 specifically, he essentially opened with 10.03 off of that training. At his size and not focusing on the 100m, that is crazy. You’re telling us you think he was somehow maxed out even for a season best at 10.03 in one race? That, when deciding to focus on the 100m instead, he couldn’t bring down his best substantially?
2. You say he was fully mature at 15, but have you ever seen him or know anybody that saw him then (at say, Penn Relays)? He had very little musculature and was just a lanky stick.
3. I don’t think anyone doubts anymore that he could be (hell, probably is) on drugs of some kind, but what do you expect people to say? Do you expect people to assume he’s on drugs and ban him without testing positive? A lot of shotputters have said no one can throw over 70’ clean—do we just ban all of the throwers? There are a lot of sprinters that get caught that run 10.1 and if you look at the Olympic results from the mid 80s, most of them were found to be on drugs and they would barely make it to NCAAs out of the regional. Let me guess though, only Usain is using and all of the other people—including the droves of college athletes who run faster than olympians not very long ago—are clean. The hypocrisy is just amazing.
