Before I go into the doping itself, I want to preface this information. I love Usain Bolt as a sports personality and I have the utmost respect for athletes who train hard year round to perform in summer meets and championships - regardless of whether they dope. If we look at most of the globally successful sprinters over the years - Marion Jones, Maurice Greene, Carl Lewis, Linford Christie, Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery, Tyson Gay, Justin Gatlin and Asafa Powell to name but a few - all have been detected as having doped or clearly implicated in doping. Bolt’s 100m and 200m records are considerably faster than any of the men mentioned above ever achieved - meaning that he is faster than elite athletes who we know have doped. That alone raises some suspicion to say the least but my reasoning goes much, much further.
First of all the biological passport which takes a profile of an athletes hormonal level throughout the year was only introduced in 2014. Synthetic hormones such as Testosterone, Dihydrotestosterone, HGH or one of several other androgens linked to muscle strength, power and recovery have hugely beneficial effects on athletic performance. Before 2014 athletes could cycle these hormones freely throughout the year in training camps. Testosterone itself will cycle out of your system in just over three weeks although the athletic gains will last many months, even years. Thus to detect a drug as simple as exogenous testosterone you are reliant on stringent year round out of competition testing. This kind of testing is difficult to enforce in countries like the UK and the US - where there is significant infrastructure and the will to do so. In Jamaica, there were neither the facilities or desire to carry out such testing it simply didn’t happen. It would have been very straightforward to dope year round and arrive at the championships clean - in fact this has been the modus operandi for athletes all over the world for decades (look up Alan Wells if you want a perfect profile of an athlete who likely operated in this way). If athletes in the US have gotten away with this - and they have - then it would be a cake-walk for athletes in Jamaica to do so. Clearly doping pre 2014 would have been relatively straightforward.
The next point I would make is in the career progression of Bolt himself. Although he was an outstanding junior athlete, there have been many of those - each season we get a new world junior champion and in most cases their senior career times improve only fractionally from the times that they are running in their late teens. At the world championships in 2007 - Bolt was 21 years old. In terms of hormones - this is the male peak meaning that in theory if you are training to your maximum - you should be getting close to your maximum output (barring other factors such as skill and psychology which are actually fairly limited in an event as technically simple as the 200m). In the world championship final Bolt clocked a time of 19.91 finishing second to Tyson Gay who ran 19.76. The following year Bolt took gold in the Beijing Olympics running a time of 19.30. This is an improvement of 0.6 seconds in the space of one year. In sprinting, this is a gargantuan improvement. Improvement of 0.6 seconds simply do not happen after the age of about 15 and certainly not between the ages of 21 and 22 when the athlete has already been a fully developed man for several years.
The following year in Berlin Bolt ran the truly astonishing 100m time of 9.58 and 19.19 in the 200m. His time in the 100m is almost absurd. He demolished his own record set in Beijing by more than 1/10th of a second. Previous men to hold the world record include Tim Mongomery (confirmed doped), Maurice Greene (clearly implicated in the Balco scandal), Asafa Powell (part of the unregulated Jamaican doping set-up and subsequently found guilty of using performance enhancing stimulants). So Bolt has destroyed records that were set by doped athletes. This is another piece of circumstantial evidence - but a significant one. The margin of victory in the 200m in particular was quite unprecedented. In 2007 Bolt had beaten the third place athlete Wallace Spearmon by just over 1/10th of a second, little more than a meter. Only 2 years later Bolt beat Spearmon, again in third place, by 0.66 seconds and approximately 7 or 8 meters. Over that 2 year period Spearmon had improved his time by approximately 0.15 seconds - a significant enough margin - and yet Bolt was able to make 4 times the improvement in the same amount of time at approximately the same age. You have to question how likely this scenario is without the use of drugs.
It may seem like I’m going over the top with the details but it’s very important to look at things closely. The man we’re talking about is the face of athletics. The more you look at the detail, the harder it is to view Bolt as clean. As Rae Edwards, former US track athlete, posted on his Facebook at the time - these are ‘computer game times’. He should know better than most - he was a member of the US track team and later the Nigerian track team and had a PB of 10.00. Nothing of note in the modern era but in many coaches opinions, that’s not far off the limit on what a precociously talented non-doped athlete can run. If fellow athletes are making those kinds of comments it’s difficult to ignore them.
The next point I would make is related to Bolt’s physiology. At his height, clearly his stride is his great advantage. His great disadvantage is the limited amount of force is long, rangy limbs are able to put through the ground. When talking about power in sprinting, this is what is being referred to - the ability to put force into the ground. This is related to the angle at which your foot hits the ground and muscular power you’re able to put through each time you strike. As every force exerted has an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s third law if there are sports fans who are less familiar with Physics), the amount of force exerted into the ground is equal to the amount of force that pushes you forward so to speak. In Bolt’s case he simply doesn’t seem to have the natural frame to generate great angles of striking through the ground, particularly in the early part of the race. However through sheer muscle power he is able to generate those angles and get out of the blocks at rate that puts him on par with other athletes. The potential advantage in doping for an athlete like Bolt who naturally has good stride length and a fast turn-over (leg-speed) would actually be greater than it would be for a shorter athlete. At 6 foot 5 going from a lanky, spindly musculature to a thick, powerful one would offer a far greater return in terms of speed than a stocky 5ft10 athlete simply becoming a little more powerful (although this too would be useful). This I believe is the crux of Bolt’s success - in a field of dopers - his physiology simply has the most to gain from doping due to his height. For one thing he gains extra power and secondly he also gets better control of his limbs which you can see back in 07 were the typical tall guy running style. By 08 and 09 he looks like a stocky 6ft5 guy if that is possible with perfect control over his range of movement. As well as the natural benefit he would get from using hormones at his height, there is also the possibility that with the more lax doping controls in Jamaica he was able to use more substances for longer - thus giving him a greater advantage.
I think it’s highly probably guess that he went on a more advanced program between the 2007 and 2008, then cycled again before the 2009 season and possibly again before the London Olympics. If you look at Bolt’s physiology in the so-called off-seasons, post-season and late season in comparison to 09, 09 and 12 - it’s markedly different - much more the type of physique you would expect from a man at his height - more slender and gangley. When we have seen Bolt in world record breaking shape he has looked a very different athlete - huge across the shoulders and thighs. A 6ft5 runner ought to look lanky - and at certain points he does - and that’s when he runs slower times. At other points he looks thick, almost stocky even at 6ft5 - and that is coincidentally when he runs the superman times.
At the end of the previous paragraph I used the phrase ‘field of dopers’. This is the final point that I believe casts the biggest shadow over athletics in general. Each year we see more and more athletes testing positive in retroactive testing. This alone tells us that what we believed was real and authentic in the past was in reality counterfeit and fraudulent. However retroactive testing doesn’t even cover ‘legal doping’. This is a strange phrase but allow me to explain. There is a legal range that anti-doping authorities accept as being natural. This legal range has to be wide enough to include athletes who may have extremely high hormonal levels naturally. The way this is done is that a ratio of 1:1 of testosterone would mean that the athlete simply had the testosterone level of a high testosterone male. The anti-doping authorities allow a testosterone level of up to 4:1 meaning that you can legally compete with the testosterone level of 4 times that of a high testosterone male on the basis that this might not be outside of the theoretically plausible range. As long as your hormone level didn’t exceed this then you would be competing as a ‘clean’ athlete.
To put this in perspective, a body builder taking a reasonable low dose of steroids will increase their testosterone level about ten fold. This is literally the difference between a man and a woman - so this increase has incredible physiological effects. Legally you can get to 40% of the hormonal result of a standard beginner cycle of steroids. If anyone has ever seen somebody on a beginner cycle of steroids - and I have (not myself) in recent months - the result is utterly ridiculous in terms of muscle power and development. As athletes are legally allowed to have a freakishly high testosterone level without being banned - it makes sense to artificially introduce testosterone up to the legal limit in order to get the benefits. As long as you calculate correctly and don’t overshoot then there is nothing the authorities can do to you as they have defined the maximum level of hormones acceptable so generously. In my opinion any ambitious athlete will probably take advantage of this and any athlete who doesn’t will not be able to compete at the highest level for major medals. When you consider the possibility of ‘legally doping’ it becomes almost common sense that athletes will take advantage of this.
When you look at all of these factors together it’s very difficult to maintain the Bolt is a clean athlete. I wish it wasn’t the case but I think the evidence points to Bolt having doped.
Conservatively I believe that the majority of the men and women you see in the major finals of any athletics events are doped in some way, to some degree and all of the medalists have been using hormones. I also believe that doping is massively common in sport - far more so than the mainstream press has so far reported. I’m almost certain that world champions in football, boxing, tennis and rugby have been using drug although athletics is probably the worst. Where people are making their living off sport and the prize money becomes so enticing, you can confidently expect doping to be round the corner. The new biological passport has put a real spanner in the works for professional athletes trying to gain an advantage. Expect to see much slower times for a while, until the next designer steroid comes out.
