Whicker: Jamaica pulls another fast one

2012-08-11 19:53:51

LONDON – There are 2.3 million people in Jamaica.

Not all of them break 10 seconds in the 100 meters. But nearly all of them care about those who do.

That is how you emerge from the Caribbean, from poverty and hurricanes, and, every four years, identify yourself as the world's fastest nation.

"It would be like asking somebody why Canada has the best ice hockey players," said John Henry Johnson, the USC sprint coach. "It's a ridiculous question, really. They have three sports they really care about — cricket, soccer and track and field. There are more kids in L.A. running track than there are in Jamaica. But it's more important there."

Jamaica won 12 medals in track and field here. Only the U.S. and Russia won more. But Jamaica went 1-2 in the men's 100, 1-2-3 in the men's 200, 1-3 in the women's 100, and second in the women's 200.

The men's 4x100 relay team won and broke a world record, and the women's 4x100 team won silver, and wasn't happy about it.

Total number of medals by all other Jamaicans in London? Zero. Of the 61 total medals Jamaica has won, one has been in cycling, one in the 800 meters, and the rest in sprints.

"Jamaica can already look and say, look, we've got three or four guys, like Dexter Lee, coming and they're going to the next Yohan Blake," said Ato Boldon, the former UCLA sprinter from Trinidad and Tobago who was here for NBC.

"I remember looking at Yohan Blake at the Caribbean World Championship when Asafa Powell was the man, and they were saying he was going to challenge. Everybody laughed because Asafa was 9.7 and this guy had just run 10.1. That was five years ago, so it doesn't take long for their neophytes to become world challengers. They grow up very fast. They have to because it's so competitive. It's such a religion. They eat, breathe and sleep track and field."

And now Jamaica has produced the best sprinter of all time. No one before Usain Bolt had won the 100 and 200 in consecutive years at the Olympics.

Apologies to Michael Phelps, but Bolt was unquestionably El Hombre of these Olympics.

A sign on a sporting good store asked, "Usain, when you win silver, come see us." No chance of that, of course, and Bolt anchored the world-record-shattering 4x100 relay team.

Bolt also has introduced NBA-style mugging and self-celebration to an event that demands monastic concentration. It doesn't affect him but it might well affect his imitators.

He celebrated his 26th birthday in these Olympics, and he can't pop the parachute just yet. Blake ran 19.44 in the 200 and 9.75 in the 100 and won neither race, and then there's a kid named Dexter Lee on the rise.

"They draw 35,000 for their high school championships," Johnson said. "People jump over barriers, risk their lives to watch it.

"But I've been to the town that Bolt comes from. It's on the side of a hill, and when the hurricanes come, all of those corrugated tin houses get washed off the hill. So they gather up the tin and put them back up. I never saw so many great 200 runners from such a little town."

Before Bolt, Don Quarrie was the only other Jamaican to medal in the 200, and his time was 20.22 in 1976.

Are the Americans declining? Well, Tyson Gay ran 9.80 in the 100. That wins silver in Beijing and gold in every other Games. It won fourth here. Fourth wins nothing.

"Wes Felix ran against Bolt when Wes was 18 and Bolt was 15," Johnson said. "I couldn't believe a 15-year-old could run like that. Then I went to his hometown. Out of that one little town I've never seen so much 200-meter talent."

But the real 400 meter wakeup call came when not one American man made the finals. Americans had won gold in the 400 in every Olympics in which they had participated since 1952, and had swept the podium in 2004 and 2008. This time, Grenada's Kirami James won by a half-second.

That's the same Grenada that America invaded, on its coffee break, in 1983.

"I think all of our countries have better tracks and facilities than they used to have," said Jarrin Solomon, a 400-meter man who grew up in New Mexico but competes for Trinidad and Tobago. "And there's a lot of emphasis on the gym now, ever since Bolt."

Given all the distractions, a sprint medal by an American might turn out to be the bigger miracle.

"There's no question in my mind," Johnson said, "that if Bolt grew up in the U.S., he would be Terrell Owens today."

Let it be said that the world has a far greater need for one Bolt than two T.Os.

Contact the writer: mwhicker@ocregister.com

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