So the USA does have a Bolt and probably has many of them… they just play different sports.
This is not exactly true, American Professional sports place a premium on size, which I believe is wrong. Nothing about Lebron, Kobe, or AP tell me they could suceed in a track event at a national level, High Jump, Discus, 400m Hurdles, and Javelin would be the best bets for Lebron and Kobe, but Peterson would have to show something more than decent straight line speed and acceleration. Football gets guys like Spiller, Demps, and Charles, but even these guys don’t get the backing they need at the NFL level to succeed at the NFL level, they are all stereotyped, and only get the chance to suceed when chance happens by injury and that chance is taken away by injury as well.
I was reading an article about how our professional players in the NBA and NFL would make great soccer players and this is absurd, despite their physical abilities those NBA and NFL players have they would not be the same athletes with the same abilities with soccer conditioning and skill sets placed on them. Ray Lewis as a sweeper in soccer, Lebron as a keeper, Kobe and Durant as striker/forward? Ray Lewis would have to slim down to 175-180 lbs to be effective in conditioning and the skills required of the position, Kobe and Durant are too tall and slow to play to fastest and 2nd most agile position in soccer, and Lebron despite his wingspan would be too slow and lack the agility to be an effective keeper. I make the argument all the time about Rugby and Football, the US will not ever field an effective national rugby team looking for NFL type players. The United States has plenty of athletes for Olympic Sports, they just do a poor job of developing those athletes in Olympic Sports at the scale the major professional sports do. The reasoning is simple, we pump billions of dollars into 4 sport categories and the only reason we are competitive in soccer and tops in swimming is the amount of money we as a country have put into developing those sports compared to what other countries spend. The soccer mom’s of the 1990s are paying off now for the US and we will probably see continued success in that sport for the years to come, and like it or not Lance Armstrong paved a way for the US to become a top nation in cycling, but on the same hand track cycling in the US needs a major boost.