Here's a better question that no one seems to be asking:
Why are there really weird fanboy type people oddly message board warrior-like about individual sprinters from the past who were neither particularly charismatic, nor all that consequential-in hindsight-. On this board (a distance based website to boot), every once in a while, someone randomly posts hyperbolically about:
Ben Johnson
Donovan Bailey
Michael Johnson
Maybe to a lesser degree Bob Hayes
And now....Asafa Powell.
All Powell ever seemed to do was get walked down by Gay and Bolt. It happened CONSTANTLY, and not just in championship finals. If the argument is that he had impeccable speed endurance, then that's either the weird fanboy 'ish I am talking about, or Gay and Bolt's "SE" were just that historically good , much to to Powells poor luck (while that's probably true -drug fueled or not-, I would contend that other guys like Blake and Atkins also less dramatically walked down Powell on occasion in the last 40 meters, too).
Powell seemed to be era defining when he started to churn out low 9.8s, and then high 9.7s, with near regular consistency. But in hindsight he was really just a bridge between the Greene era and the Gay/Bolt era and he isn't really all the defining. The only reason he could have been capable of a 9.6x is because he would have been pulled through it in the wake of Bolt and Gay (and perhaps Blake), not because he was -in and of himself- that much of a stand out in his OWN era.