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Usain Bolt ready for Justin Gatlin clashes at World Athletics Championships
Usain Bolt’s coach Glen Mills has backed the sprinting superstar to come good at this month’s World Championships in Beijing. 22-30 championships at the Bird’s Nest stadium and victory for the in-form American would serve as an unwelcome reminder of the scourge of doping.
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As the vultures circle athletics before the world championships, the spectre of doping will thrust intense demands on the sport’s new order, as well as its established heroes.
Bolt silenced some of the growing doubters in his return July 24, twice in a little over an hour at the London Olympic Stadium.
Instead, it is Bolt around whom doubts have been swirling, given his lack of races. He called it an appearance that was “all about getting race-ready”.
The integrity of track has been battered this year under a doping cloud as thick and persistent as the haze that hovers over China’s capital. “There’s a lot of other athletes out there that are running clean”.
The towering Jamaican went on to claim an unprecedented second treble at the London Games in 2012 and has won every world sprint and relay title on offer, bar a hiccup in the 100m in the 2011 Daegu worlds when he was disqualified after a false start.
More recently, reports from German broadcaster ARD and The Sunday Times newspaper in Britain examined results of 12,000 blood tests involving 5,000 athletes from 2001 to 2012.
On Friday, the World-Anti Doping Agency announced that is has begun an investigation into the allegations.
The victor will oversee a sport with only one true, worldwide star.
He may end up being a sideshow to another instalment of Usain v Justin, but the 20-year-old, who trains with Bolt in Jamaica, is fast realising his promise.
Although the Jamaican’s 200m world record of 19.19 is some way off, the callow Japanese sprinter can only benefit from rubbing shoulders with track’s speed kings.
“It’s really taken centre stage”, Bolt said. That’s his only meet since June 13, when he ran his slowest 200m final since 2006, two years before he burst onto the scene by breaking the 100m world record.
Amid the steady drip-drip of doping controversies in recent years, both Coe and his rival for the IAAF presidency, Sergey Bubka, promised a crackdown on drug cheats as they bid to replace Lamine Diack.
“We still have a good team and I hope that things will work out well”, Watts said. “If the rules say you can get back in the sport, I can’t do anything about it. I abide by the rules and that’s pretty much all”.
“I just see it as high stakes race”.
“For me, I’m not anxious about anything”, Bolt said.
Olympic 800 metres champion Maria Savinova’s apparent confession in an undercover documentary that she had used the banned steroid oxandrolone came after a spate of failed tests before the 2012 London Games and subsequent bans for walk champions Valery Borchin, Sergei Kirdyapkin and Olga Kaniskina.
