All I could hear was something said ‘Go’ in my head.
Usain Bolt
Yohan Blake is famous for training hard, like a beast. But what does he do when he’s not working? How does he spend his downtime?
‘Catch wild coyotes,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘That’s a joke, man. I play Ludi, I play dominoes, I play cricket with my boys, you know?’
His eyes flicker; he glances towards his agent and friend, Timothy Spencer, and quietly adds: ‘Sometimes I read love novels, you know?’
‘Love novels?’
‘You know, you have Romeo and Juliet, you have The Notebook. I’m actually reading The Notebook every day. You know this love story; this guy and girl were seventeen, you know. Put it in your phone, look it up. I read motivational books, too. Ben Carson.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t like to sit down. I like to keep active.’
I have no idea if Blake is telling the truth or winding me up. I change the subject. What’s the story with his nails? He wears them long. Not just a little bit long, but a good inch: like claws. I tell him that I haven’t seen nails like that on an athlete since Flo-Jo.
‘Yes, like a beast.’ He glances admiringly at them. ‘I will cut them at different intervals,’
Spencer interrupts. ‘It’s a superstitious thing’
‘It isn’t,’ says Blake.
‘It is,’ says Spencer. ‘He won’t cut them before a race. But he cut them for Lausanne and ran 9.69, so I said, “What do you think of that, Yohan?”’
In 2011, the world’s fastest two men trained together every day. Blake, still only twenty-one, had progressed rapidly the previous season, whereas Bolt had barely raced and suffered only his second defeat over 100 metres, after his 2008 loss to Asafa Powell in Stockholm. This time he was beaten by Tyson Gay, again in Stockholm. Yet as the 2011 season got under way, it was Blake who seemed to pose the real threat. Bolt must have felt it; he must have been conscious of the younger man on his shoulder, gaining speed, pushing him.
And Blake, too – he must have been measuring himself against the fastest sprinter in history on a daily basis. ‘Nothing big, it was nothing big,’ he says. ‘I was training with Usain from 2009 when I went to the Racers. I waited and waited. Then I was in the big time.’
Even when they became rivals as well as training partners, there was no problem between them in their daily sessions, insists Blake. ‘We have good chemistry. He likes to talk to me; he’s not that stuck-up guy who don’t talk.’
As Blake began to emerge, there were rumours that he and Bolt were training separately, that they weren’t talking. The stories annoyed Glen Mills. Asked to compare his two star sprinters, he said: ‘One is tall and one is short.’ Reluctantly he added: ‘I’m happy to speak about each but I don’t do comparisons because I coach them and have to maintain balance.’
I asked Zharnel Hughes, the eighteen-year-old Anguillan who broke Blake’s 100 metres record at Champs, about the atmosphere at Racers training. Hughes was a relative newcomer; it was still a novelty to him to be training with the best in the world. ‘Bolt is friendly but he doesn’t talk much,’ he said. ‘Blake, you’ll hear him talking the loudest. Sometimes when he crosses the finish line he shouts out something funny. He makes you laugh. He’s like a clown. Bolt, you really won’t find him saying much, but you hear him with Blake, joking, “Come on, man, finish the programme! Don’t cheat the programme!”’
Blake says that in Daegu, at the 2011 world championships, when they both qualified for the 100 metres final, Bolt didn’t seem any different; he was his usual self. If he was anxious about the race, or wary of the man expected to be his main rival – who also happened to be his clubmate and training partner – it didn’t show. Then again, Blake knew that Bolt’s schtick was to be relaxed, or to appear relaxed. And what, in the end, is the difference? ‘He always creates this atmosphere of being relaxed, it is true,’ Blake says. ‘Then he goes out and does his tricks before the start. But in the call room he’s alive, he’s not too serious. When you’re not too serious and you’re relaxed, there is not a lot of tension in the body.’ It echoes Dennis Johnson and Bud Winter and his ‘relax and win’ philosophy. ‘That’s good, you know,’ Blake continues. ‘Usain creates that atmosphere not only for himself but for other people.
‘Some guys, you can see the tension. You can see their face tight, their body not loose. You think, All right, Yohan, you’ve got him covered.’
Daegu saw a decaffeinated final: no Asafa Powell, who had a groin injury, or Tyson Gay, also injured, and no Steve Mullings, the third fastest man of the year, after his second positive test.
At the start, it was business as usual. Salutes from Bolt to a large Jamaican contingent in the crowd – including his parents, sitting with Norman Peart. Bolt stretched his arms. He was in lane four, Blake in lane five; he grabbed his training partner’s hand for a loose (relaxed) handshake as they passed. Nesta Carter, the third Jamaican and one of Stephen Francis’s men, was in lane seven. As they lined up, Bolt pointed to his left and shook his head; pointed to his right and shook his head; pointed at himself and nodded. Then, just before he stepped towards the blocks, he let out a primal yell. The eight men settled, waiting for the gun, and the stadium fell into restless silence. One moved – Bolt. And then the gun went.
It wasn’t a twitch, a reaction to a noise in the stadium or a reflex response to another athlete moving. It was one man breaking the line. It was an unequivocal false start, which meant automatic disqualification. And it was Bolt, there was no disguising that, though a couple of other finalists were sure the officials would find some way to exonerate the culprit. (‘I actually thought they were going to blame it on me,’ said Kim Collins. ‘I really didn’t think they was going to throw Usain out,’ said Walter Dix, ‘because, well, it was Usain.’)
Bolt knew what he’d done. As he launched from the blocks, he opened his mouth in another yell, then carried on for a few strides down the straight. In one fluid movement he whipped off his vest and dumped it on the track. He slowed and turned round, walking back towards the blocks. Blake, wide-eyed, stared after him and slowly shook his head. In the stands, Jennifer Bolt’s eyes were fixed on the track, her expression one of utter horror. Then she threw herself to the ground, as though trying to hide. ‘He take off him clothes, he take off him clothes!’ she cried when she got back up. Removing his shirt seemed to be a way for Bolt to spare himself the indignity of being disqualified -it saved the officials the bother of presenting a red card.
Topless, he marched past the blocks, shouting to himself, then slapped the wall beneath the stands and slumped to the ground, sitting there with his arms hooked around his knees, as dejected as he is usually so ebullient. The mask had slipped – here was the other Bolt: anguished and angry rather than relaxed and jovial. It betrayed what he tried to conceal: how much it meant to him.
The question was: why had he done it? To match the kind of time he ran in Berlin? Or because he feared defeat, and couldn’t afford to concede even a centimetre to Blake? Bolt had qualified from his semi-final in 10.05, Blake in 9.95. But in anticipating the gun, rather than reacting to it, Bolt broke Coach Mills’s cardinal rule: ‘My coach always explains that it’s not about anticipation,’ he said later.
The remaining finalists were called back to the start. The atmosphere in the stadium was now as deflated as a burst football. Blake settled in the blocks, the empty lane beside him as glaring as a missing front tooth. Thirty-five-year-old Collins got off to a flyer, but Blake, his head down for the first ten metres, powered smoothly along the track -gliding almost, his feet appearing to only dab the surface. He seemed to keep accelerating and crossed the line a comfortable winner, with a Bolt-esque margin over Dix of 0.16 seconds. The winning time: 9.92 seconds. Although it was into a stiff breeze, most believed Bolt would have beaten that even if he had waited for the ‘G’ rather than going before the ‘B’ of the bang (a little over two weeks later, in Brussels, he ran a season’s best 9.76 ).
There were parallels with Shelly-Ann Fraser’s win in Beijing in the mystery over the winner. Who was this guy Blake? Victor Conte was among those who wondered. ‘OK, so initially you hear that Usain Bolt is a genetic freak, that he’s very tall, with this stride length which means he takes fewer strides than everybody else. Then here’s Yohan Blake – he’s not tall!’ Yet Conte could, begrudgingly, admire his run. ‘Oh, Bolt and Blake are very talented, genetically gifted athletes. They have great technique. They are very well trained.’
Blake was a ‘meanwhile’ at the foot of news reports: ‘Meanwhile, the race was won by . . .’ Few were interested in him as the winner, even as the youngest ever 100 metres world champion. ‘I’ve been working hard for this moment,’ he said after a lap of honour draped in a Jamaican flag given to him by Bolt’s mother. ‘I’ve been dreaming of this moment.’ It had cost him restless nights. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep; I’ve been up at night praying.’
When his training partner was disqualified, ‘For a split second I was breaking down inside,’ said Blake, ‘but I said to myself, No, you have to get focused, you have to get the job done.’ His only sadness was that he and Bolt couldn’t go home with the gold and silver medals, as planned. ‘The key’, he added, ‘is Coach Mills and God.’
Bolt, meanwhile, had bolted. He was shadowed throughout 2011 by a French film crew, and they couldn’t find him. Neither could Ricky Simms, his agent, who appeared after the race looking bewildered. He gave an interview on Bolt’s behalf, then admitted he hadn’t spoken to him, nor had he any idea where he was.
When Bolt reappeared, reporters and TV crews stalked him as he strode across a dark car park outside the stadium. He was surly, in a foul mood. ‘No comment,’ he said. ‘Looking for tears? Not going to happen.’
Bolt was sharing an apartment with Blake and Asafa Powell. His first post-race exchange with Blake was captured by the documentary crew. He is slumped on the sofa when Blake appears, and he adopts an announcer’s voice: ‘The new world champion, Yohan Blake!’ Blake smiles. ‘It’s not a team sport, but if I didn’t get it, I’m happy he did,’ says Bolt. ‘I’ve seen him train, man. I’ve seen the work he put in,’
At 1.50 a.m., Bolt is still slumped on the sofa, computer on his lap, phone in his hand. He seems to be the only one up – other than the light from his gadgets, the apartment is dark and quiet – and he looks in reflective mood. ‘I was just pissed with myself, man. I just couldn’t believe it. You see people on TV false-starting and you say, that’s bad luck. Then you feel how bad it is. It’s awful to false-start.
‘I was in great shape, I was running fast, I was good. I was sure I was going to get the gold medal. So to know it’s going to happen and then you lose. Or not even lose, you don’t make it to the finishing line . . . Very hard, very hard. I was just frustrated, man.
‘You can’t dwell on the past, man, you learn that. I grew up in the church. You learn that God has a plan for everyone. I have one more race to go.’
You can see him trying to look forward and put the disappointment behind him. But he can’t let go. ‘I’m kind of pissed at myself coz I’ve been working hard on my start especially.’ He looks up, addressing the film’s director, Gael Leiblang. ‘You’ve been along the way, you’ve seen the work I’ve put in. You’ve seen what I’ve gone through. It finally came together at the right time, and I pretty much squandered it, I would say. I don’t know what happened. Can’t believe it happened; I kept saying to myself, “Why did you false-start, why did you false-start, why did you false-start?” It’s never happened. Major championships: that’s what I live for.
‘All I could hear was something said “Go” in my head and I just went. Then . . . what the hell happened? I guess tonight I was my worst enemy.
‘But you can’t dwell on the past, mate,’ he adds, lurching into cockney.‘Moving on.’
Six days later came the 200 metres, and as Bolt and the other finalists settled in the blocks, an anxious silence descended. There was a look of dread on the face of Jennifer Bolt. When the eight runners rose in unison after the gun, the noise in the stadium was that of relief. Bolt won easily in 19.40 seconds, three-tenths of a second ahead of Dix and Christophe Lemaitre.
‘Who’s the champion now, uh-uh?’ he sang, performing a jig inside the stadium.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce could only manage fourth in the 100 metres, though she teamed up with Veronica Campbell, the 200 metres gold medallist, to win the 4x100 (the men also won their sprint relay, with two of Mills’s athletes, Bolt and Blake, and two of Francis’s, Carter and Michael Frater, in a new world record).
It was a minor setback, reckoned Fraser-Pryce. She had problems with injuries after returning from her doping ban. She had other commitments, too: she had got married, and then there were her studies and her family. She had bought her mother a house in a safer part of Kingston and tried to do the same for her grandmother. ‘She didn’t want to leave,’ Fraser-Pryce says. ‘It’s hard to convince somebody who is that old to move.’ Then a solution presented itself. ‘My uncle died and that left a big space at the front, so I built her a house there. She’s OK there: nobody’s going to harm her.
‘Helping my family,’ she says, ‘I think is the most enjoyable and sometimes the most stressful part of everything. You try to see how you can assist with everything, but there are limits.’
It was difficult to keep the same focus on training and competing. There were so many demands on her time. She set up a charity, the Pocket Rocket Foundation, paying for seven youngsters to attend school: buying uniforms, books and food. Each was, like Shelly-Ann, from the inner city. They had been chosen by her, and had targets to reach at their schools; a report was sent to the foundation every month with an update on their progress. ‘This is not for publicity, for the TV,’ she says. ‘I am concerned with them and what they do next. Their parents are poor. If they can understand that I care, outside of the foundation . . . and if they make it, they have a chance of helping someone else. Then it becomes a cycle, it spreads.’ The foundation was, she explains, ‘born out of what Jeanne Coke did for me. It’s about education and sport and linking them to try and transform individuals’ lives, and [have] these people transforming Jamaica.’
Asafa Powell has his foundation, Usain Bolt has his, and after his success, Yohan Blake got in on the act. His is called YBAfraid (Why Be Afraid?) and helps vulnerable young people. He supports the Mount Olivet boys’ home: a centre for homeless and abused boys, which includes ‘Expressions Through Creativity’ workshops in art, music and drama.
Bolt’s is focused on helping young people through ‘education and cultural development’. I was told that Bolt also helps individuals. While visiting the University of the West Indies one day, I asked for directions from a groundsman, who insisted on jumping in the car to guide me. ‘Bolt help a lot of kids,’ he said. ‘He pay for a lot of kids to go to school in Kingston.’
Bolt can afford it, but the others’ ability to keep pumping money into their foundations is entirely dependent on their continuing success on the track. So they end up not only running for themselves and their families, but for lots of other people too: for the poor of their country; for Jamaica. It is another cycle, in addition to Fraser-Pryce’s virtuous one, that puts a lot of expectation, and pressure, on the athletes. Fraser-Pryce’s setback in Daegu didn’t just affect her profile as an athlete; it affected her earning power, which affected her foundation and, in turn, the seven youngsters whose education depends on it.
She also has her hair salon, of course, where we are sitting in the plush pink-and-black reception area discussing how she recovered from the disappointment of Daegu and the previous season, with her positive test. Her appetite didn’t diminish, she tells me, despite the demands on her time and attention. She says that after Daegu, her motivation was even higher. She was determined to defend her Olympic title in London. It was the same as being back at school: feeling that she had been written off. ‘People always thought because I was short, and I wasn’t very good in high school, I couldn’t make it. For them to see me perform as I do . . . when people say, “When I see you running it makes me happy because you’re so short but so fast.”
‘I still go to training as if I’ve won nothing. My husband said this to me last week when we were driving. I was saying, “People don’t get me, they don’t get why I always train, why I’m so focused”, and he says to me that I train almost as if I am hungry. He told me, “You train as if you’ve never won anything. You train and if you can’t train you sit there and cry – but you’re the Olympic champion.”’
While the world’s best sprinters were preparing themselves for the London Olympics, their country’s anti-doping agency was floundering. In July 2012, less than a month before the Games began, JADCO appointed a new executive director.
Renée Anne Shirley had done everything: she was a financial consultant before reinventing herself as a radio and TV presenter and newspaper columnist in the late 1990s; she then became a government adviser and sat on the boards of various task forces. She was chief executive of the Jamaica Rugby Football Union. She had a BA in economics and was the first black woman to graduate with an MBA from the University of Virginia; then there was the PhD in public administration from the University of Kentucky.
It was her work as a government adviser that took Shirley into the field of anti-doping. From 2003-7 she was senior adviser to Jamaica’s first female prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, leading and coordinating the development of Jamaica’s Anti-Doping in Sport Programme. She headed the Jamaican delegation at the International Convention Against Doping in Sport in Paris in 2005, attended the International Convention on Doping in Sport at the UNESCO Headquarters, also in Paris, then the World Anti-Doping Code Review in Amsterdam, in February 2007. In November of the same year she was official observer to the Third World Conference on Doping in Sport in Madrid.
She knew her stuff, then. And when she took over at JADCO, she was determined to do the right thing, not necessarily the most popular. She was well aware that the organisation had problems, not least since the order from WADA to appoint a new board. She knew she’d have to roll her sleeves up. ‘I am not a believer in patting ourselves on the back and saying, “We believe our athletes are not cheating.”’
When she took over at JADCO, ‘There were quite a few things I had to sort out and fix up,’ she tells me over lunch at Ziggy’s, a cafe at Twin Gates Plaza in mid-Kingston that she says offers traditional Jamaican food. It is also a place where the other customers are not likely to be interested in what she has to say: things that have previously got her in trouble.
Shirley’s few things to sort out and fix up turns out to be an unusual case of her glossing over the actuality. You don’t need to spend too long in her company to appreciate that she is to straight talking what Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce is to running quickly. ‘JADCO was badly set up,’ she sighs. ‘The legislation was badly written. There was a lack of staffing, but my main concern was the lack of testing.’ The absence of out-of-competition testing particularly worried her. ‘Once you’re successful – the kind of success that Jamaica had since Beijing – it called for us to have really strong and rigorous and robust anti-doping.’
She saw immediately that JADCO couldn’t do that. There was only one full-time doping control officer, no one in charge of running the ‘whereabouts’ programme, and the TUE committee (which decided when athletes could legitimately use banned products by issuing a Therapeutic Use Exemption) was without a chairman and had never met. The accounting department was non-existent, and no monthly financial statements had been produced in five years; bills were outstanding.
The situation had been infuriating JADCO’s most senior drug-tester, Paul Wright. Yet some of the problems stemmed, Wright told me, from the WADA intervention in late 2010. ‘The entire board was dismissed, right? Then the general election came up and the country voted out that government, and a new government was in. The election was in December [2011].’ In all that time, JADCO was rudderless. ‘I was testing all along,’ Wright says. ‘Then there was nothing in January [2012]. Nothing in February. We had no board, so there’s no testing!’
The statistics for the period confirm this. When it came to out-of-competition tests, in February 2012 there were twelve, in April just one – and that was it. None in March, May, June or July. The Olympic Games in London were fast approaching. ‘I was making phone calls,’ says Wright, ‘I drive to Jamaica House’ – the office of the prime minister, who also looks after the sport portfolio. ‘I said, "This is Olympic year. We are the biggest sprinters in the world and we can’t just stop testing the year of the Olympics. People are going to believe we’re hiding something. You’ve got to get this board in place and restart testing.”’
Wright knew the names who were being considered for the new board. He also knew that the same problem would arise – that WADA would object on the grounds that there were too many potential conflicts of interest (perhaps an inevitable problem in a country with such a small middle class: these being the people who volunteer for such positions). When the board was announced, he was dismayed to see who was on it. He called the prime minister to complain and was told: ‘Dr Wright, these are our friends, they have spent their life contributing to sports, you must stop maligning people of integrity.’
Still there was no testing. It was only when Renee Anne Shirley was appointed, one month before the Games, that things started to happen. ‘I joined after the national trials and started the out-of-competition testing,’ she says. ‘But they had not tested for six months prior to the London Games. One of the reasons was that their test kits were out-of-date.
‘It was a fight from the beginning. Every excuse was that we didn’t have the money. But with the money we had, we could have done more.’
Even before she started at JADCO, Shirley had the feeling that more effort could be made to look into some of the darker recesses of sport. She was aware of the threads connecting Jamaican athletes and coaches to doping scandals, and of testimony during the Balco case alleging that Raymond Stewart gave drugs to his wife, Beverly McDonald, on the eve of the Athens Olympics. ‘I went to the prime minister,’ says Shirley, ‘and said that as a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Code, we should at least investigate it. We should call [McDonald] in. What are we going to do: wait for them to take the gold medal away from us? I said, “You should at least be seen to be doing something.”
‘I can tell you that I got no traction from that at all.
‘But listen, my friend,’ Shirley adds. ‘Jamaica is not unique. Kenya is not unique, China is not unique, Great Britain is not unique. It is the same everywhere. When any country is winning gold medals, they don’t want to look too closely. Every country wants to hear their anthem, to see the gold medal around their athletes’ necks.’
For Olympic year, ahead of the defence of her title, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce made a renewed commitment to God. Winston Jackson, senior pastor at the Penwood Church of Christ, said that she had always been a ‘church girl’, and that the church had helped her and her family through ‘some early struggles’. Now, said Jackson of Fraser-Pryce’s running ability, ‘she realises it’s not her, it’s really God. You can see the change in her.’
She also renewed her commitment to MVP, after reports of discord and several defections over the winter. Ristananna Tracey, Kimmari Roach, Peter Matthews and Darion Bent all left for Glen Mills’ Racers Track Club, and there were rumours that Fraser-Pryce might follow them. It saw a deepening of the rift between MVP and Racers, especially when Bruce James, the MVP president, claimed that ‘the other club’ paid their new recruits. ‘Unlike another track club in Jamaica, MVP does not pay our developmental athletes cash,’ said James. Former MVP athletes had informed him, he added, ‘that the other club pays them cash monthly, in addition to providing them with " accommodation in apartments off campus, among other enticements’.
Racers responded with a statement: ‘A clear distinction must be made between athlete recruitment and athlete support. Racers Track Club maintains a restrained policy of recruitment and an active policy of support.’ It continued: ‘Do we seek to support our athletes financially? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. We do try to assist our athlete members to keep body and soul together in the hard times before they become celebrities and before they excite the attention of potential sponsors.’
Fraser-Pryce had a quiet start to 2012. As well as preparing for her Olympic defence, she was finishing her studies; she graduated with a BSc in child and adolescent development and says her degree was as important as her athletics – in many ways it meant more. ‘For me it wasn’t sport or education, it was both. Both were my way out. It’s possible. I lived it. I got my degree while being a professional athlete.’ It was her ‘greatest accomplishment’, she says. Graduation day felt like another Olympic final. ‘Everyone came to my graduation, because I grew up in the inner city and some things happen that you don’t expect. Young girls getting pregnant, dropping out of school, not going to school . . . that happened to a lot of my friends, too many. Not being part of that statistic feels . . .’
Good? ‘Yeah,’ she nods.
As the clock ticked towards London, she gained ground. At the Diamond League meeting in New York in early June, she blazed to a win in 10.92 seconds. She was on track. She underlined it two weeks later, at the Jamaican trials, flying to victory in 10.70, a personal best, 0.12 seconds in front of Veronica Campbell-Brown. No arguments over selection this time.
In London, she was bidding to become the third woman to retain the Olympic 100 metres title, after Wyomia Tyus in 1968 and Gail Devers in 1996. When Devers won her first gold medal, in 1992, the woman she narrowly beat was a Jamaican, Juliet Cuthbert. Cuthbert now owns the gym in Kingston where Fraser-Pryce regularly trains. In 1996, when Devers retained her title, it was another photo finish: this time she just got the verdict over Merlene Ottey.
With the Games in full swing, the women’s 100 metres, heats and final, are on the first two days of the athletics programme. Fraser-Pryce progresses smoothly, winning her semi-final in 10.85 to make it to the final, twenty-four hours before the men’s. It’s the night the home crowd are calling ‘Golden Saturday’, as Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford win gold medals.
Fraser-Pryce is not everybody’s favourite: Garmelita Jeter deposed her as world champion in Daegu and is in sparkling form. The American is a thirty-two-year-old enigma, a woman of few words who seems reluctant to engage with the media. She made a sudden improvement relatively late in her career, going from a best of 11.48 in 2006 to 10.97 in 2008. She is coached by Maurice Greene’s old coach, John Smith, and her late blooming invites suspicion. ‘I’m 32 and clean,’ she told Sports Illustrated. When people doubt her, ‘I pretty much accept it. But it’s hurtful, and I’d like to get credit for what I’ve done.’
They line up for the final and the camera pans along the line. Muscular and powerful, Jeter looks formidable and serious, frowning and chewing her lower lip. Whereas for Bolt, when the camera reaches him the view is of his chest, when it reaches the diminutive Fraser-Pryce, the view is of fresh air. It has to dip down to find her. She seems as relaxed as Bolt – genuinely, naturally relaxed. When the camera finds her, she flashes a megawatt smile and gives a vigorous wave, but there are no tricks, no showboating. Her only gimmick is a golden ribbon in her hair. She is introduced as the defending champion, an idea that seems to amuse her; her eyes sparkle, her smile broadens and becomes a laugh.
Fraser-Pryce lingers back as they are called to the blocks. Her expression is serious now. She breathes deeply, puffing out her cheeks, narrowing her eyes; she says she has tunnel vision before a race: ‘Once I get in my blocks there is nothing in my mind.’ The athletes settle and are called to ‘set’; she is last to rise but first out of the blocks, though only just – it isn’t her best start, which annoys and worries Stephen Francis, watching as critically as ever – ‘very messy’ is his verdict. At fifty metres, she and Jeter emerge at the front, one lane apart and impossible to separate. Just like in Beijing, Fraser-Pryce’s head is tilted back, eyes locked on the big screen: watching the race? If she is, then she is oblivious as she crosses the line. She stops, hands on hips, sucking in oxygen, and stares at the screen again, watching the replay. Her brow is creased; she looks worried.
The time, 10.75, appears first, then the finishing positions. 1. Fraser-Pryce (Jam), 2. Jeter (USA), 3. Campbell-Brown (Jam). When she realises, she throws herself to the track, shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’
Back home in Waterhouse, they watch Fraser-Pryce’s run in the house she built for her mother. More than ten members of her family squeeze into the living room, watching a small television, cries of ‘Go, Shelly!’ accompanying her all the way until she dips for the line. That is followed by a brief, stunned silence, and then an eruption of screams and yells and they spill out to join the street party. There are vuvuzelas, Jamaican flags, one youth dressed as the Grim Reaper in black suit and mask, hanging on to a car, on roller blades. There are shouts of That’s our Shelly! That’s our Shelly!’ Children using the lids of pans as cymbals, crashing them against each other. ‘Big up to mi sister Shelly,’ says Andrew Fraser, her brother, in a red NYC baseball cap, earrings sparkling in his ears, tears welling in his eyes. ‘She train hard for this, mi see now, it pay off. Mi sister right now are mi icon. Right now mi don’t even know, mi just feel overwhelmed right now, yeah.’
Inevitably in her press conference, with the men’s final twenty-four hours away, Fraser-Pryce is asked about Bolt. Is she fed up with being in his shadow? I’m not one who loves the limelight,’ she says, ‘but sometimes I go to the supermarket they ask me questions about Usain. They ask me, “Where’s Usain? Where’s Usain?”’
Wherever she goes she is asked whether she trains with Bolt. ‘I don’t.’
As Bolt prepared for his final, the threat, as in Daegu, seemed to be Blake. At the national championships in Kingston at the end of June, their first meeting since the world championships, he had been blown away by the Beast. It was as though the memory of Daegu, and the fear of false-starting, weighed on Bolt’s mind. He got a sluggish start and was never in the race. Blake won in 9.75, a personal best and stadium record. Bolt, a desperate look on his face as he chased his clubmate’s shadow, trailed in 0.11 behind for second. Powell, back after his injury, was third: the top three qualified for London.
It didn’t have the prestige, but winning the Jamaican title was harder than winning the world title. Blake, who after Daegu ran the second-fastest 200 metres of all time, 19.26 seconds in Brussels, also beat Bolt in his stronger event, with Weir third. Defeat in his beloved 200 metres cut Bolt deep. ‘I was very sad with my turn,’ he said. ‘It was awful, but I’ve been working more on the 100 metres. I can’t blame it on that, though. I just have to get my things together and get it done.’
Glen Mills wasn’t worried. ‘Usain, he has the experience, the ability. He has been there already. He might be a little off at the moment but I’m sure when the time of delivery comes around, he’ll be on top of his game.’ There were four weeks to go until London. ‘We’re right where we want to be, going into London,’ Mills said. ‘We just want to keep them healthy. That’s the key.’
It was almost as if Bolt had been playing with people, cultivating a bit of mystery and suspense with the questions over his fitness and form. Keeping everyone on their toes, including himself. Ever since Berlin, when he had a quiet season in 2010, and then the Daegu debacle in 2011, rumours and gossip about Bolt have had a tendency to swirl around Jamaica. When I was there in April 2014, the story was that he had a debilitating foot injury, and that the minor op that had been reported was actually major surgery. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see Bolt run again,’ said one athlete’s agent. A few weeks later, he returned to competition.
In July 2012, a couple of weeks before the London Games, Bolt did admit, ‘For the first time I’m slightly a little bit nervous.’ Because Blake was faster? ‘I should think I’m definitely faster than Yohan Blake,’ he clarified. Always, with Bolt, beneath the facade there lurks a steely competitor.
In fact, Bolt said later, Blake did him a favour at the national trials. ‘It was like he knocked on my door and said, “Usain, this is an Olympic year, Wake up.”’
When the 100 metres finalists enter the stadium and wait behind the blocks, to be introduced like prizefighters, all eyes are on one man; one man who couldn’t have been more comfortable on this stage, with this kind of pressure. ‘All right, this is it,’ he says. ‘It’s game time.’ He enjoys the crowd’s response, the fact that 80,000 pairs of eyes are watching him, expecting another miracle.
Then a brief flicker of fear – a shadow flitting across his face – before he settles into the blocks. It’s like the blood drains briefly from Bolt’s face. Daegu isn’t on his mind. Or not much. ‘First of all, my coach explained to me, it was all about reacting and executing. I got to fifty metres; the last fifty metres are my race.’
Justin Gatlin insisted that he started the race believing he could win. Earlier in the season, in Zagreb, Bolt talked about his American rival’s macho posturing at the start: 1 just think that’s what he’s used to. He’s pretty much an old-school athlete and, back in the day, it was all about intimidation.’
Gatlin gets an incredible start and has clear track in front of him. Then he senses Bolt. ‘I mean, he’s six-five, you can’t miss him,’ he tells us later. ‘When his legs lift, you can see it, you can feel it.’
As Gatlin and Tyson Gay fade, Blake and Bolt emerge, then there is just Bolt. ‘The last fifty metres,’ says Blake. ‘That’s when he decided to pull up beside me, and I said, “Wow.”’
Bolt wins in 9.63 seconds, beating his own Olympic record, second only to his time in Berlin. Blake’s time in finishing second (9.75) and Gatlin’s in coming third (9.79) would have won the gold medal in every other Olympic final in history – apart from Beijing. Gay misses a medal and breaks down in tears: ‘Ain’t nothing else I could do. I don’t have excuses, man, I gave it my all. I feel like I let a lot of people down.’
The press conference begins just after 11 p.m., over an hour after the race. This is backstage, shorn of the Olympic sheen: a nofrills, brightly lit conference room, a table at one end, with bottles of (official) drinks, and seats arranged in front with space for about eighty reporters. The three medallists shuffle in together. Bolt smiles and jokes with Blake, who looks nervous, while Gatlin seems out of sorts, as though he wonders what he is doing here. He has a point: few are here to hear from the bronze medallist. Gatlin looks his age – thirty. And as they whisper and giggle to each other, Bolt and Blake look theirs, or younger.
Blake explains, ‘Usain Bolt told me to keep calm. This is my first Olympics, so he encouraged me . . . It was just fun out there. Bolt has a way of keeping me calm. I’m grateful of course, I’m happy.’
Gatlin: ‘It feels good to be back here, being part of history. It means a lot to me. I’m really glad to be here.’ The elephant in the room: his ‘previous’ for doping. Or, as Gatlin euphemistically refers to it: ‘ups and downs’. He adds: ‘You know, watching Bolt, watching Blake, and what they’ve done, has been the inspiration for me to work harder, to work the angles, to be a better runner.’
Bolt talked on the eve of the Games about attaining the status of ‘legend’. ‘It’s a first step,’ he says now. The 200 metres will be another step. He acknowledges one journalist’s reference to the only other sprinter to successfully defend the Olympic 100 metres title, Carl Lewis (after Ben Johnson was disqualified). But Bolt is not rising to the Lewis bait. Not yet.
Towards the end of the press conference, a curve ball: ‘A question from Germany, Usain. Dr Müller-Wohlfahrt is your doc: how did he help you? And how German is your success?’
‘Dr Müller-Wohlfahrt is a major part of my success, a major part of my career,’ Bolt replies, suddenly more animated. ‘I have been going to him since I was probably nineteen, eighteen, since I first had an injury. He’s really done a number, done great work on me. After trials I went to him, he looked at my muscles, he did his treatment, and said, “Usain, you’re going to do great, go back, train.” He gave my coach the go-ahead. So he plays a very important role.
‘He’s more than a doctor. He takes us to dinner, he really looks after me. He comes in on weekends to treat me. I thank him and the girls in the office.’
Later, Bolt celebrates his win in his room in the athletes’ village with three members of Sweden’s female handball team: a moment he captures with his phone and posts on Twitter. The Swedes bumped into Glen Mills in the dining room and asked if they could meet Bolt. He led them to Bolt’s room, where they stayed until 3 a.m. ‘It was awesome, he wasn’t cocky or anything,’ said Isabelle Gullden. ‘He wasn’t drunk, either, he’d just got back from the race.’
If the one-two in the 100 metres was extraordinary, then what was the 200 metres, four days later? Warren Weir had been a decent hurdler at school, spotted by Herb McKenley, and transformed into a 200 metres sprinter by Glen Mills. At Racers Track Club, training with Bolt and Blake, he couldn’t cope with the workload initially; he wasn’t strong enough, and kept breaking down, partly because of knee problems related – thought Mills – to the strain of hurdling. Weir is slightly built and wiry; in fact, he, Blake and Bolt are all very different shapes. Mills encouraged him to take things slowly. The secret to his eventual breakthrough? ‘Patience,’ he says. ‘I was supposed to go to Daegu, but Coach said, “You’re not fit enough; we’re going to wait,”’
In London, having qualified for the final, Weir was anxious. ‘Before all the cameras and before the running was nerve-racking,’ he tells me when we meet in a hotel in New Kingston. ‘It was my first championship. The first day, I wasn’t nervous. I had nothing to lose, but getting into the final, it was a bit nervous.’ Yet, having run 19.99 to finish behind Blake and Bolt at the Jamaican trials in June, he believed he should be capable of a medal in his first Olympic final. ‘Yes, because when I looked at the times going into the Olympics and the final, I was right in the medals. So I was expecting to get a medal, but at the same time I was saying to myself, “If I don’t, it’s OK, it’s my first Games.”’
In the call room before the final, he tried to ease the tension. ‘I was laughing and running jokes. I was saying to [Wallace] Spearmon and Bolt and Churandy [Martina]: “In 2008, I was in high school watching y’all guys at Beijing on the couch. And now we’re in the same final.”’
Weir’s game plan was to ignore Bolt and Blake and run his own race. Easier said than done, since he was in lane eight while in lane seven was Bolt. ‘I was very realistic out there. I said to myself, I’m nowhere in the range of Bolt and Blake; they are running some extremely fast times. But third place was up for grabs. Everybody with a shout of third place was running pretty much the same time as I was.’
Bolt drew level with Weir in thirteen steps. He and Blake, in lane four, were already out front, running their own race, but Weir led the others coming off the bend. He was aware of Spearmon challenging and lunged for the line – dipping too early, so that his head was down. He didn’t see whether he got it. ‘I could not judge if I had come third. I had to wait for the replay and the scoreboard. You see people celebrate too early – I didn’t want to do that. Then I saw the places and I ran over to Bolt and Blake, who were celebrating up the track. “Yo, I came third.”
It was joy,’ says Weir, ‘joy all over. To get a one-two-three from the same club, from the same country, from the same coach, and to know that we’d been training for like three years before the Olympic Games was wonderful.’
Is Mills someone who celebrates moments like this? ‘I saw Coach after the race because I was in [anti-]doping. So Coach was very excited and he said to me, “Patience.” He said to me then, “Patience pays off.” Because it was all about building up gradually.’
Weir didn’t make the team for the 4x100 metres relay, when Bolt and Blake were joined by Nesta Carter and Michael Frater: once again, two from Racers, two from MVP. Their winning time, 36.84, was a world record. Bolt confirmed afterwards that he was a legend now. But he’d got something else off his chest after the 200 metres, something he had been building up to saying. Flanked by Blake and Weir, he leant forward, into the microphone: ‘I am going to say something controversial right now. Carl Lewis, I have no respect for him. The things he says about the track athletes is really downgrading, for another athlete to be saying something like that about other athletes.’ Since 2008, Lewis had been voicing his suspicions about the Jamaicans.
Bolt had hinted after the 100 metres that he had something to say, but bit his tongue: ‘Patience,’ as Mills might say. In footage filmed by Weir in their living quarters in the athletes’ village, Bolt can be seen lying on a massage table, muttering about Lewis. But once he finally started, he didn’t seem able to stop. ‘I think he’s just looking for attention, because nobody really talks much about him so he’s just looking for attention. So that was really sad for me when I heard the other day what he was saying. For me it was upsetting. I have lost all respect for him. It was all about drugs, talking about drugs, a lot of drug stuff. For an athlete out of the sport to be saying that is really upsetting for me . . .’
Lewis wasn’t the only one in his cross hairs – Victor Conte had been in the news claiming that doping remained rampant. ‘It is really annoying when people on the sidelines say stupid stuff,’ Bolt continued. ‘Without a doubt we are drug-free. We train hard. I see us all train together, we throw up every day, we take ice baths, we end up flat out on the track. When people taint us it is really hard but we are trying our best to show the world that we are running clean.’
Beside Bolt throughout the London Olympics, including at his press conferences, Blake smiled, but he wasn’t overly happy. He reckoned his 100 metres had been one of his worst – a badly executed race (he would prove his form a couple of weeks later, running 9.69 seconds in Lausanne to make him, with Tyson Gay, the joint-second-fastest man of all time). ‘That was my best race,’ Blake says of Lausanne. ‘At the Olympics I tightened up a bit.’ It was a missed opportunity. He believes he could and should have won the Olympic 100 metres final. ‘I was leading and I said, Yes, Yohan, you got this in the bag – as soon as I thought that, I tightened up.’
His time would come, Glen Mills was sure of that. Midway through the London Games, Mills confided in another member of the Jamaican entourage. Bolt had been hinting that he might finally give the 400 metres a go, and could do the 200 and 400 at the Rio Olympics in 2016, when he will be thirty. It seemed unclear; up in the air. His coach wasn’t sure whether he would try the longer distance. He seemed certain only about one thing, and it concerned the blue riband event, the 100 metres: There’s no way’, said Mills, ‘that any thirty-year-old will beat Yohan Blake in 2016.’