The Lightning Bolt

Usain Bolt must either be from outer space or the future or most likely both. The first X-Men movie starts with Jean-Luc Picard saying, “Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.” That’s this guy. He’s obliterating records that have, historically, moved glacially, and about five years before his physical prime. Most sprint records are broken by one or two 1/100ths of a second once every two or three years by guys in their late twenties. He’s about to turn twenty-three. He’s dropped both the 100m and 200m world records by .11 seconds since he broke them both a year ago at the Olympics. It took the rest of the world twenty-five years to lower these two world records as much as he has in the last thirteen months. He’s too young to have good technique, and he’s no where near as strong as he can be. People are speculating that he could run faster than nineteen seconds flat in the 200m before he’s done. That would have been considered physically impossible by a human being just ten years ago. I’m so excited about this guy because he’s pushing human achievement to a new plateau, and he’s doing it in a pure sport. He’s an individual in a lane running as fast as he can. There are no polls or politics, no strength of schedule, no real strategy. It’s just him and the clock. The only thing that dampens my enthusiasm is the specter of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs, whose presence in professional team sports doesn’t bother me. I wish the Jaguars were on PED’s, but I pray that the Lightning Bolt is just hopped up on Jamaican yams becuase a dirty test will justify all the cynics' raised eyebrows, including mine. I haven’t been this jacked up about an athlete since Michael Jordan came back from his broken foot in 1986. Usain Bolt wasn’t even born then, but I’m interested in him for the same reason: impossible is just a state of mind.