‘I’ve no respect for Lewis’ says angry Bolt

Bolt held court, the other medal winners in the 200m final, the young Jamaican pretenders Yohan Blake and Warren Weir sitting alongside him, largely in silence. Bolt did his ‘I Am Legend’ bit over and over. “Bask in my glory,” he joked. “And, oh, you gotta do this or else I’ll never talk again, I’ll be checking. Tell everybody in your country to follow me on Twitter.”

He bounced around into all sorts of other territories – playing football for Manchester United, playing professional cricket, the greatness of Bob Marley, a night out with the Swedish handball girls and why he has earned the right to be mentioned in the same storied category as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. And from beyond left field, his thoughts on the love of a good woman. An Italian journalist asked what kind of lady could possibly meet the expectations of a legend such as He. “An actress, a queen, the fastest girl in the world?” pondered the reporter. The room erupted in laughter and Bolt was in his element. “I used to have a type,” he said. “But I don’t anymore. For me, it’s all about falling in love. There, yeah, I said it!”

Twenty five minutes in, unprompted, he dropped a bombshell about Carl Lewis, the American champion whose conceit of himself is so great that he’s found it hard to watch Bolt rewriting the record books in the sprinting game these past four years, many of which Lewis himself helped write in the first place.

“I am going to say something controversial right now,” said Bolt. “Carl Lewis, I have no respect for him. The things he says about the track athletes is really downgrading. I think he’s just looking for attention really 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. That was really upsetting for him just to jump up and say something like that. As far as I’m concerned he’s looking for attention – that’s all.” It was his second jab at Lewis of the night. Earlier, once his place in the annals was guaranteed with his Olympic double-double, Bolt spoke in the mixed zone close to the finishing line, Lewis again on his mind. “I think a lot of these guys who sit and talk, especially Lewis, no-one really remembers who he is, so he is just looking for attention. That is my opinion. It is really annoying to know that people are trying to taint the sport. The sport has been going forward. For someone to say that without any proof is really annoying. We work hard. We push ourselves to the limits.”

The room knew what it was getting here. The greatest of all sprinters sparking a war of words with the man he took over from. Bolt versus Lewis. Wow! What was confusing, though, was why now? Why did Bolt pick this moment to go on the attack? There had been talk before the 200m final about 60 per cent of athletes in the Games being on some kind of doping programme but those were the thoughts of Victor Conte, not Carl Lewis. Conte is the convicted owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) and the disgraced supplier of performance-enhancing drugs to Marion Jones and Dwain Chambers among many others. Lewis hadn’t gone there. All he’d said in the preamble was a kind of whiny ‘the American sprinters are better than the Jamaicans’ but he hadn’t raised the drugs issue.

Life moves fast for Bolt. When he said he read Lewis’s comments the other day did he mean that he’d read them four years ago and that they only seemed like the other day? Or that he was reminded of them the other day? Or maybe used them as motivation. Unquestionably, Lewis has said plenty in the past that called into question the performances of Bolt and this remarkable countrymen and women. The comments are old, but they’re real. This what Lewis told Sports Ilustrated magazine in the weeks after Bolt’s emergence in Beijing. “I’m still working with the fact that he dropped from 10-flat to 9.6sec in one year,” said Lewis of Bolt’s time progression in China. “I think there are some issues. I’m proud of America right now because we have the best random and most comprehensive drug testing program. Countries like Jamaica do not have a random program, so they can go months without being tested. I’m not saying anyone is on anything, but everyone needs to be on a level playing field.

“No one is accusing anyone. But don’t live by a different rule and expect the same kind of respect. They say, “Oh, we’ve been great for the sport.” No, you have not. No country has had that kind of dominance. I’m not saying they’ve done anything for certain. I don’t know. But how dare anybody feel that there shouldn’t be scrutiny, especially in our sport? The reality is that if I were running now, and had the performances I had in my past, I would expect them to say something. I wouldn’t even be offended at the question.

“So when people ask me about Bolt, I say he could be the greatest athlete of all-time. But for someone to run 10.03sec one year and 9.69sec the next, if you don’t question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you’re a fool. Period…Not to say [Bolt] is doing anything, but he’s not going to have me saying he’s great and then two years later he gets popped. If I don’t trust it, what does the public think?”

The public, or it seemed a large percentage of them, felt that Lewis’ jealousy was out of control, that his pomposity was at the root of his remarks, that he couldn’t stand seeing somebody diminishing his legacy in the sport. And they thought him a hypocrite. Who the hell was Lewis to rail on the drug-taking issue when he himself had tested positive on three occasions leading up to the Seoul Games of 1988, the Ben Johnson Olympics if you will. “That was an issue where people tried to make something out of nothing,” countered Lewis. “It got thrown out. I didn’t lash out. They said I tested for stimulants found in over-the-counter cold medications. That’s it. I did nothing wrong.” The smell lingers in the air around Lewis, however. But just because he is not particularly well-liked on account of his great narcissism, does that mean he should be ignored on the question of the Jamaicans? Not really. Blake, for instance, failed a dope test once and served a three-month sentence. A minor offence, we’re told. Steve Mullings, another Jamaican sprinter, tested positive at the world championships last year. In 2009, five Jamaican athletes tested positive for a stimulant at the national championships, including Blake. The athletes were served with three-month suspensions and allowed to resume their careers. A year later, the world and Olympic champion Shelly Ann Fraser-Pryce tested positive for the painkiller Oxycodone and was subsequently banned for six months. We might not like the messenger, but the message is worth heeding. We don’t need to believe it, but we need to take cognisance of it. Bolt stated categorically on Thursday that he is clean and that they are all clean in Jamaica. We await Lewis’ response. In the meantime, we can but marvel at the great man, the most dominant sprinter there has ever been, the fastest, the most charismatic, the legend. He owns all the records and all the titles, his latest gold medals achieved while not fully fit. “To have set a goal for yourself for years to become a legend, you can’t really explain what that means,” he said. “It’s not going to hit me until I sit down and think about it. I can’t explain the happiness. I’m not saying I’m going to cry but I’m going to be real happy. I’ve made myself a legend and I’m going to enjoy it. The doubters can stop talking now.”

The doubters? Carl Lewis and who’s army?