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.
Did Michael Phelps use performance-enhancing drugs? There is not a shred of such evidence. However, as a model for youth, he loses attraction when you remove him from the water. After winning 6 medals at the Athens Olympics in 2004, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to drunken driving at age 19. He got off easy. "I recognize the seriousness of this mistake. I've learned from this mistake and will continue learning from this mistake for the rest of my life," Phelps told the judge and more than 100 spectators who packed the courtroom. Let's see what he has learned.
In December of 2008, he was photographed in a Las Vegas strip club making an ass of himself by fondling and drooling over the performers. He would have to have been intoxicated to act so foolishly when he knows that video cameras follow him everywhere. Then in February of 2009 he is seen and photographed puffing on a bong at a party in Tampa. Other guests say he was out of control from the moment he arrived at the party.
So much for the guy decorating the breakfast cereal boxes. What will happen to his lucrative endorsements remains to be seen. Will he be able to appear as the keynote speaker at the Get Motivated seminar along with Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Zig Ziglar and Steve Forbes in March? His subject matter is advertised as "How competition can sharpen your talent and strengthen your weaknesses. How you can establish and maintain the competitive advatage in your fiels. Exactly how to become the best in the world at what you do." If I were he, I'd call in sick.
Usain Bolt was just 21 years old at this year's Olympics and he stands 6 feet 5 inches, taller than any previous world record sprinter. His height is a disadvantage getting out of the starting blocks and may or may not be an advantage during the rest of the race. Kinesiologists say that all world-class runners move their legs at about the same speed and their feet are on the ground less than a tenth of a second during each stride. The deciding factor in speed involves an equation of force to body weight. Tyson Gay, after having finished second to Bolt, said the difference between them was the size of stride. Bolt covered more ground per stride than Gay.
Bolt's records will probably be broken, but I suspect he will be the one to do it. He's still young for a sprinter and will develop more leg strength. I bet on him to be the man to run below 9.70, a feat considered impossible not many years ago when sprinters thought 10 seconds flat was beyond human capability.