I'm a skeptic too

[Richard]

I've been skeptical of Jamica's ability to perform at such a high level. Seems I'm not the only one. Note the reference to the lack of an out of competition testing protocol in Jamaica.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/sports/olympics/22longman.html

[dauwhe]

Will being skeptical in this case make me any happier? No.

Do I have any evidence that Bolt is using drugs? Even rumors? No.

If I believe he is clean, and end up being wrong, will I suffer harm? No.

So I believe he's clean.

Dave

[Climb01742]

apparently he's been precociously fast at each youth, sprinting stage of his life. he may just be a sprinting phenon. or he may be on drugs. at this point i'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

[Kervin]

I think you should look a little deeper before calling Bolt a doper. Since 2001, his times have gone lower and lower. He ran a 19.93 in 2004 when he was 17. I don't recall where I read it, but the general thinking is that there is a upper limit to human leg speed in sprinting so faster times will come from a longer stride. Bolt sure has the long stride thing going!

[Richard]

Saying I'm a skeptic is a far cry from calling someone a doper. I have developed a well founded skepticism from following bike racing and track for many years. It has been my experience that when someone makes something really hard look too easy, there is more to that than simply good training and diet. Jamaica is a tiny country that produces an inordinate number of very fast runners. And, if you read my post, I don't point out anyone. The article may, but, again, my skepticism arises from the size of the country producing such a huge number of spectacularly fast runners.

[Tom]

All I know is it just annoys the crap out of me to see him run. I remember when I felt that light on my feet. Obviously not as fast but there was a day when there was joy in my stride. No more. Jealous? Yeah. Youth is gone and replaced by crushing despair.

It sucks when beauty just pisses you off.

[Fixed]

running is a national sport they get coaching all through school
cheers imho

[Kervin]

Saying I'm a skeptic is a far cry from calling someone a doper. OK, I jumped in with both feet on that one. I read a piece (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/athletics/sprinting-in-the-blood-of-jamaicas-champions-903966.html) that talked about the system that has helped jamaica have the number of sprinting stars. I think if you look at the total number of world class athletes they produce, it is a small number. They just happen to all be sprinters.

[fiamme red]

OK, I jumped in with both feet on that one. I read a piece (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/athletics/sprinting-in-the-blood-of-jamaicas-champions-903966.html) that talked about the system that has helped jamaica have the number of sprinting stars. I think if you look at the total number of world class athletes they produce, it is a small number. They just happen to all be sprinters.Don't forget the Jamaican bobsled team. :p

[Kevan]

It sucks when beauty just pisses you off.

troot???

[BumbleBeeDave]

All I know is it just annoys the crap out of me to see him run. I remember when I felt that light on my feet. Obviously not as fast but there was a day when there was joy in my stride. No more. Jealous? Yeah. Youth is gone and replaced by crushing despair.

It sucks when beauty just pisses you off.

Now there you are;
Yes, there's that face,
That face that somehow I trust.
It may embarrass you to hear me say it,
But say it I must, say it I must:
You have the cool, clear
Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
Yet there's that upturned chin
And that grin of impetuous youth.
Oh, I believe in you.
I believe in you.

I hear the sound of good, solid judgment
Whenever you talk;
Yet there's the bold, brave spring of the tiger
That quickens your walk.
Oh, I believe in you.
I believe in you.

And when my faith in my fellow man
All but falls apart,
I've but to feel your hand grasping mine
And I take heart; I take heart

To see the cool, clear
Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
Yet, with the slam-bang tang
Reminiscent of gin and vermouth.
Oh, I believe in you.
I believe in you.

---"I Believe In You," music and lyrics by Frank Loesser

[ergott]

I'm just put off by the antics of many runners after the race. The whole victory lap does nothing for sportsmanship. I would never teach my kid parade around like that regardless of the venue. You don't see as many athletes sticking their face into the cameras declaring their number one status in other sports. Too alpha-male/female for me.

[maunahaole]

Don't forget the Jamaican bobsled team. :p

Sprinting skill translates well to bobsled. In 4-man, two of the crew are ballast - their only job is to get a fast push from start to sitting. If you watch bobsled, the start times are a measurable statistic. IIRC the US had a sprinter on a crew for a while as well. The other two positions - driver and brakeman have some skill involved and are each individually responsible for good times as well.

[Charles M]

Too alpha-male/female for me.

If there's a proper descrition for guys that explosive and powerfull, It is "Alpha"


Evidenced

Alpha Banana: :banana:

Beta Banana: http://www.fotosearch.com/bthumb/IDX/IDX045/454962.jpg

[Bud_E]

I know he's a hot dog and a showboat and can be disrespectful, but I can't help it - I just love the big guy. His antics strike me as being youthful exuberance rather than mean-spirited. And watching him run is just a thing of beauty.

[Cdub]

He is a kid. He actually speaks well and somewhat respectfully during interviews. The parading around, well, he is a kid!

They say his best event is yet to come. The 400. Warner better hurry up and set the WR tonight, Bolt will break it soon.

[cadence90]

I know he's a hot dog and a showboat and can be disrespectful, but I can't help it - I just love the big guy. His antics strike me as being youthful exuberance rather than mean-spirited. And watching him run is just a thing of beauty.
I agree with all that, except I think he appears (to some people) to be disrespectful. I don't think he actually is disrespectful, as far as I've seen.

He is a kid. He actually speaks well and somewhat respectfully during interviews. The parading around, well, he is a kid!

They say his best event is yet to come. The 400. Warner better hurry up and set the WR tonight, Bolt will break it soon.
Exactly. A happy kid. His enthusiasm is infectious. Did you see how he and Spearmon are always joking with each other, even walking out to the track? At the Olympics! That's great to see.

I think all the Caribbean sprinters are clean, as I think the Kenyan distance runners are.
In both cases, they have huge talent pools per capita and very long histories of specializing in those particular events.

[William]

Don't be haters mon. ;)





William

[rwsaunders]

I'm just put off by the antics of many runners after the race. The whole victory lap does nothing for sportsmanship. I would never teach my kid parade around like that regardless of the venue. You don't see as many athletes sticking their face into the cameras declaring their number one status in other sports. Too alpha-male/female for me.


Football comes to mind. Every play is followed by some type of theatrical chest beating or jumping. It grows a bit old.

[Climb01742]

i'd cut athletes a bit of slack for the olympics. four years is a lot of pent up feelings. football, on the other hand, is very old. i think it was jerry rice who said about TD celebrations...act like you've been there before.

[fungusamungus33]

It takes believing that you are the best to be that fast. Bolt is very young. Will he act the same way in Olympics to come? That will be the test of his talent and maybe humble maturity. Did you act the same way under high stress at his age as you do now? Do you ever have cameras documenting you under stress to perform at world record pace for anything? I don't because I couldn't handle it even if I had the talent. He is a cool cucumber. I'm jealous, in a way, but all of the performances have been exciting and really fun to watch. If Bolt gets in the 400 he could really be amazing. We'd have 40 seconds to watch him on the track rather than 20. Something to look forward to....

[Blue Jays]

Bolt simply strikes me as an enthusiastic guy who doesn't know what to do with his joy at winning.
His antics at the Olympics don't bother me at all and usually make me laugh. :)

[Bud_E]

I agree with all that, except I think he appears (to some people) to be disrespectful. I don't think he actually is disrespectful, as far as I've seen.


...

Yep. That's what I meant. I agree with those that say his antics come from a sense of joy at being at the height of his powers - not an "in your face" expression. And his poses crack me up.

I guess this is one of those things that strikes completely different emotions in different people.

[dauwhe]

Keep in mind that we are judging someone from a different culture based on the standards of our own culture.

I thought it was cool when someone invited the head of the IOC to Jamaica, and offered to teach him to dance!

Dave

[1centaur]

That whole "I'm awesome but I'm humble" ethos is hardwired into the American psyche so much probably from Puritanical roots (pride goeth before a fall). We demand that quality from our politicians (raving egomaniacs), CEOs, movie stars, and pretty much everyone else in the public eye, and they all know it. What are the odds that most of those types really are so humble - they're fronting and we willingly accept that. There's really nothing inherent in the universe that says someone should not be joyful at his abilities. American sports figures are PR coached to behave that way to make money off the public (Kobe) but they don't feel that way. I'm fine with authentic happiness from Bolt and kid-like expression of that - there's little enough along the way as it is. He'll be trained next time; we'll see if it feels more like Kobe than we'd like.

The average victory lap, however, is just another example of PR - generating video and stills for commercial work to come, with flags at the ready from helpers, not spontaneously relinquished by patriotic fans.

[Needs Help]

I think all the Caribbean sprinters are clean, as I think the Kenyan distance runners are.
In both cases, they have huge talent pools per capita and very long histories of specializing in those particular events.
Talent per capita?

Nation 1:
100,000 people
100 sprinters
talent per capita = 100/100,000 = .0001

Nation 2:
300,000,000 people
1,000 sprinters
talent per capita = .000003

Are you saying that Nation 1 is more likely to produce faster sprinters because their talent per capita is higher? To me it looks like Nation 2 is ten times more likely to produce the fastest sprinter.

[Bud_E]

...
The average victory lap, however, is just another example of PR - generating video and stills for commercial work to come, with flags at the ready from helpers, not spontaneously relinquished by patriotic fans.

At least we haven't heard "I'm going to Disneyland!" ... (yet :rolleyes: )

[cadence90]

Don't be haters mon. ;)





William
No kidding.

Bolt is donating $50,000 to relief aid for the Sichuan earthquake, to help in the reconstruction and, in his words, also as a gesture of thanks towards the Chinese people, whom he feels have been extremely kind and supportive of him.

I don't how many people here saw the apartment where Bolt lives in Jamaica, but it is certainly no palace, and the donation is a very classy gesture for a 22 year old kid.

I still wish China had given Joey Cheek a visa, but Bolt's gesture indicates real goodwill and humanity, and puts the politics aside. Good on him.

[mikki]

I know he's a hot dog and a showboat and can be disrespectful, but I can't help it - I just love the big guy. His antics strike me as being youthful exuberance rather than mean-spirited. And watching him run is just a thing of beauty.

+1. I too think that he's just "stupidly young" and his antics will mellow as he matures. Makes me smile to see him enjoying himself rather than being so darned serious. Perhaps if more athletes enjoyed themselves and their bodies during the Olympics, we would see more records broken.

[steelrider]

+1. I too think that he's just "stupidly young" and his antics will mellow as he matures. Makes me smile to see him enjoying himself rather than being so darned serious. Perhaps if more athletes enjoyed themselves and their bodies during the Olympics, we would see more records broken.

Plus 1. Remember the German weightlifter who won the Gold? The guy was completely stoked. He was dancing around and he started to peel of his shirt. He also displayed a picture of his wife. It turns out that she had recently died in a car wreck. I could not help but tear up. Such honest, raw emotion is truly heartening. I will take the Olympics any day, even the obscure events, over American professional sports.

[andy mac]

Genetics?? Interesting article:


Out of Africa: the speed gene genie

Andrew Stevenson | August 23, 2008

GOLD medallists raise their fists in jubilation and sleep well at night knowing they're the best in the world. Drawn from about 200 countries, they compete against one another under the utopian banner, "One world, one dream".

But did they really beat the world or do the specific genetic characteristics of different population groups mean that the Olympics - open to ever-wider participation in the shrinking global village - are actually a race narrowed down to rivals from their own distinct ethnic group?

In Beijing, for the first time at an Olympic Games, every competitor in the men's and women's 100 metre sprint finals traced their ancestry to West Africa. Even more remarkably, 15 of the

16 runners are descendants of the slave trade, living in the Caribbean or the US. Jeanette Kwakye is the exception, born in England of Ghanaian parents.

The fastest runner in Australia this year, Adam Miller, of Penrith, on his best time would have trailed Usain Bolt - who backed up to win the 200 metres with a remarkable pair of world record times - by nearly a dozen metres.

White men cannot run. But they can jump and lift huge weights and swim, if not like fish, then faster than anyone else on the planet. Welcome to the race race, where winners are not just grinners, they're athletes who were smiled on by the genetic gods, argues Jon Entine, author of Taboo - Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It."To a large degree it's not who works the hardest [who wins] but who had the genetic gods look down on them with favour and the Bolts of the world fit that category," he said.

The malignant hand of the slave trade might have already played a role, intervening in natural selection with the strongest and fittest West Africans loaded on slave boats bound for the Americas, contributing to a dominance of Caribbean sprinters several centuries later. A Jamaican urologist, William Aiken, has proposed another, speculative, suggestion about why a nation of 2.8 million has achieved so much.

"Since Jamaica was one of the last stops to be made by the slave ships, it ensured that only the most resilient and fittest of slaves were alive to disembark," he wrote in an article connecting sprinting prowess with high rates of prostate cancer, both of which he suggested could be linked to testosterone levels.

The truth is geneticists have identified only a handful of genes that affect human physical performance. Kathryn North, of the Institute for Neuromuscular Research at the Children's Hospital at Westmead and the University of Sydney, has shown there is a common genetic variant in the fast-twitch muscle gene alpha-actinin-3 that renders it inactive in about 20 per cent of European populations and at least 1 billion people worldwide.

But the active form of this single "sprint gene" is found in all Olympic sprinters of European background and almost all Africans. That is one gene and many more wait to be revealed.

But the little already known indicates the power of genes - if you don't have alpha-actinin-3, you are unlikely to win the 100 metres. But the inactive form could set up a career in distance running. North's team created mice with the inactive form which could run 33 per cent further than mice with the sprint gene before becoming exhausted.

North is anxious not to rule out cultural influences such as diet and coaching, and psychological traits such as the so-called "mongrel" gene that fuels the will to win. But she agrees some distinct populations have a huge competitive advantage in certain events.

"I don't think we can ignore that we all look and perform differently in different situations," she said. "It's not that one ethnic group has an overall advantage; it's just there are strengths and weaknesses in different populations throughout the Earth that are influenced by the environment in which they have lived and in which certain traits have evolved."

Entine said there were athletic hot spots around the world based on distinct body types. East Africans dominate distance running to almost the same extent as those originally from West Africa are dominating sprinting.

"The word 'race' doesn't really apply. Look at East Africa versus West Africa. They're all Africans but the body types of Kenyans and Ethiopians are very different to West Africans'," he said. "And you can see it in swimming. You can make all kinds of cases that blacks are culturally disadvantaged in swimming but the reality is the black body type is not suited to being great swimmers."

Intriguingly, debate about genetic influences on athletic performance has been hampered by cultural and political taboos, despite frank and open discussion of how illness and disease may be influenced by genetic variations. Perhaps the memory of the attempted racial hijacking of the Olympics in 1936 still lingers.

But identifying which variations in which particular genes contribute to success in any particular athletic endeavour is extremely challenging, with the answer still several years away.

"At the moment we know only of a couple of genes, probably less than 10, that have been shown to have some influence on the different types of human physical performance," North said. "There are probably hundreds of genes involved."

But, even when they are found, will they tell us anything the naked eye and a record book do not already confirm?

If you want a weightlifter, look for someone with shorter limbs in ratio to their torso and greater upper body strength, physical features more common to Caucasians. Similarly, 11 of the past 12 Olympic hammer-throw champions came from a handful of northern European nations.

"You don't need to do a molecular test to see if someone's tall and a stopwatch does a pretty good job of telling you if someone's fast," said Jason Gulbin, who runs the Australian Institute of Sport's talent identification program.

But a genetic profile might help determine whether athletes are in the right event, whether they have a significant capacity to improve, what sort of training load they can bear and their susceptibility to injury.

"The key point is to implement research to understand the value of genetic information and this is the area that spooks people. And they get caught up in, a) the race angle and, b) the genetic manipulation/gene therapy side of things. When people hear the g-word they jump to conclusions," Gulbin said.

Despite the potential benefit of using genetics as an extra tool to screen, manage and prepare athletes, the AIS has been barred from genetic research by a directive from the former federal sports minister, Rod Kemp.

The AIS director, Peter Fricker, believes now is the time to act or Australia risks being left behind.

"A year or two ago, because there are so many other things that make a champion, I thought we could wait and see what the scientists come up with. But I worry that, because you can see countries around the world starting to do the research, we need to be on the front foot," he said. "Australia has to be in the game and we have to do it really well and we have to get reliable information so we can make sense of our talent-screening strategies."

Fricker believes we are still a decade away from reliable genetic predictors of performance that are worth building into talent-screening programs.

"Where we might end up with all this research is with a set of genetic variations - and if you've got this one, this one, this one, this one and this one, the chances are you'll be a much better athlete than someone who's only got two of those genes," he said.

"Just in raw potential, that's what the scientists are interested in - to see how accurate and how reliable having that genetic information might be. If you had no other information at all, would it really help you select the next champion?"

But while scientists such as Fricker are more cautious - citing a list of environmental factors that influence performance - Entine has little doubt genes will be able to pick winners, arguing that many key behavioural traits, such as the ability to withstand pain and a willingness to take risk, could well have genetic bases.

"There's no question that in not too many distant decades you'll be able to know right off what the parameters and possibilities are to becoming a great athlete for someone when they're popping out of the womb," he said.