Flashes of Panic

I know, I know, nobody wants to hear anything more from me about the 100m World Record. Seeing a 1-in-1000 baseball game and a World Record in one month is bad enough, but I have to rub it in.

What I’m warmed up about today, though, is how quickly the track world went from “Wow, World Record!” to “He can’t possibly be clean.” It’s hard not to be suspicious; after all, of the six men to run faster than 9.84 (Donovan Bailey’s World Record from the ‘96 Olympics), three of them (Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery, and Justin Gatlin) were busted for doping, and a fourth (Maurice Greene) has been implicated, though so far without confirmation or process. Of the six men who received gold medals for the 4x400m relay in Sydney (two ran in the rounds), four have confessed to some level of doping, enough to lead Michael Johnson, who has not been implicated, to return his medal. Most disturbing is that many of these athletes never failed a doping test; they were caught by other investigations.

So why should anyone think Bolt is clean, aside from the fact that he has never tested positive for anything?

Two things come in to play here: profile and limits. The first is easiest to explain, and I mentioned it a few weeks ago. It’s that there are two kinds of athletes who dope: those who have had success as clean athletes, but go on the juice to extend their careers, as Marion Jones supposedly did. Sometimes this makes their performances spike over the baseline they had established from years running clean, as Tim Montgomery’s did. The other type is the nobody who rides the drugs from obscurity; Ben Johnson fit this profile, as did Kelli White, the former World Champion who confessed everything when the BALCO scandal broke. Usain Bolt is neither of these; he’s only 21, and should be reaching the peak of his speed with no need for juice to keep him going. And he’s not emerging from nowhere; he was a silver medalist in the 200m last year in Osaka, and was winning junior world titles at the age of 15. He’s had a steady progression over six years in the longer event; he’s only a newcomer at the 100m.

The second argument against Bolt being dirty is the idea of limits. Let’s assume for a second that Bailey at 9.84 was clean. (This also happens to be Tyson Gay’s PR, which he has run twice.) Assuming anyone who runs faster than that “must be” doping means assuming (a) that Bailey ran a perfect race in Atlanta (which Gay and Canada’s Bruny Surin managed to duplicate on three other, later occasions), and (b) that Bailey, Gay and Surin represent the optimal body type and running style for the 100m, which cannot be improved upon.

These two assertions are absurd on their face. There’s always room for small improvements; nobody has yet run the perfect race over 100m. I haven’t studied Bailey’s Atlanta race, but I’m guessing his start was slightly flawed, maybe he had a stride off early in the race, who knows. Maybe his competition could have pushed him just a bit more, mentally. Any one of those factors could have improved him a little bit. Add that to the startling physical differences between the compact, muscular Bailey and the towering, rangy Bolt, and I have no trouble imagining that physical differences, and the different mechanical approach to the race which those dictate, could account for a difference of twelve hundredths of a second.

Do you know how little twelve hundredths of a second is? Try starting a stopwatch and stopping it again that fast. It’s such a tiny difference, much less than one of Bolt’s long strides. I can’t look at Bailey ‘96 vs. Bolt ‘08 and insist that the only possible reason for that microscopic difference is pharmaceutical.

It’s one of the tragedies of performance-enhancing drugs that it’s impossible to prove someone didn’t take them, only (sometimes) when someone did. For the time being, however, I prefer to assume Bolt didn’t.