by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: December 27, 2008   Last Updated: February 07, 2009

Most people will write that the outstanding athlete of 2008 is Michael Phelps and offer as proof his eight Olympic gold medals. I cast my vote for the Jamaican sprinter with the descriptive surname Bolt. I only wish I could come up with some obscure foreign language in which the man's given name, Usain, could be shown to mean "lightning."

I realize I am mounting a nearly impossible campaign. Simple arithmetic is against me. Phelps's 8 gold medals are going to win out over Bolt's 3. And those 8 medals honor, 7 world record times. Poor Michael in the 100 meter butterfly had to be content with an Olympic record. The world record still belongs to Ian Crocker, who in 2005 swam the distance a microsecond faster.

My vote goes to Bolt for the following reasons. His victories were absolute blowouts (unlike Phelps's touching out Milorad Cavic by a hundredth of a second in the 100 fly). There was daylight between Bolt and the second place finisher in the 100 meter dash despite his extending his arms and costing himself some time in the last 15 meters. His 9.69 beat his previous world record time by 3 hundredths of a second. In the 200 meter dash, a distance run in the original Olympic Games in 776 B.C., he bettered Michael Jackson's 12-year-old record of 19.32 by two hundredths of a second. In other words, it was more than the usual last stride lean that earned him his victory.

Another factor is that in recent years scientists have come up with swimsuits that allow for faster times and pool engineering to do the same thing. The original Olympic athletes competed nude, which probably did not give them any advantage over our jock-strapped and scantily clad sprinters of the modern day. There has been some improvement in the track surfaces of today's arenas over the dirt of yesteryear, but it doesn't approach what has been accomplished in swimming pool mechanics.

Finally, there is no minimizing Phelps' athletic accomplishments. However, I notice that Pete Rose is still not in baseball's Hall of Fame because of his involvement in gambling. Steroid use has tarnished the reputations of numerous athletes: Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi, and Roger Clemens in baseball; Marion Jones, Ben Jonson, and nearly every world-class weight man in track and field. The use of performance-enhancing drugs is usually linked with lying to the press or to grand juries. All these factors whittle away at the reputation of the athletes who become former heroes and models for youth.

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