USAIN BOLT emergence and the Jamaicans unseen sprint domination, your thoughts?

The athlete voted by T&FN and other sports affilated instituions as The Best ATHLETE of the 20th century, Carl Lewis thinks Usain Bolt may be dirty! Hey don't Usain Bolt have Carl Lewis former coach?

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Lewis shades Bolt, says former coach

October 4, 2009

IT HAS been the favourite parlour game of the track and field world these past few weeks after Usain Bolt added world championship domination to his Olympic exploits, continuing to smash world records and push our understanding of how fast a human being can run.

Is Bolt the greatest of all time and is he greater than Carl Lewis?

Bolt says he wants to be the best ever; the man he must overtake to get there is Lewis. So what, says Tom Tellez, the legendary coach who guided Lewis to nine Olympic gold medals?

''I think it's hard to go past Carl really, as someone who dominated the sport for 18 years and had so much versatility,'' he said. ''Carl didn't run for times, that's not how we coached him. He was a competitor and he ran to beat the man, not the clock. It's what we always focused on.''

Bolt's triple Olympic gold and triple gold in Berlin came with five world records. Nobody has beaten the clock with such dismissive ease in sprint history. But Tellez does not think Bolt's outright times should place him ahead of Lewis - the man who dominated sprinting for a much longer span, claiming three consecutive 100 metres world titles and also owned the long jump, winning gold at four consecutive Olympics.

''I definitely know Carl could have run faster if he was just sprinting,'' he says. ''The way he combined sprinting and long jump, I don't think we'll see anyone do that again in a hurry. You'd think it would happen more often, you need great speed for long jump, but most coaches now don't want their sprinters jumping; they worry about injuries.

''It did take a lot out of him as well. I have no doubt he could have run faster times at some of those big meets if he wasn't jumping as well.''

Between 1984 and 1996, seven American sprinters won Olympic gold. Tellez coached six of them.

The semi-retired coach is a massive Bolt fan who gets a wistful tone in his voice when asked about a hypothetical match race between the two greatest sprinters the world has seen. ''I know that Carl could have run faster. I always felt he didn't reach his full potential as a sprinter,'' he says. ''If Carl was running today he would be running faster.''

Lewis himself questioned whether Bolt was clean after his exploits in Beijing, pointing to the less than stringent Jamaican drug-testing regime. But Tellez says the 1.96-metre Jamaican's times can be made sense of without suspecting his methods.

''He has the perfect body for it; he's so tall. His stride means he takes less steps than the other guys but his technique is excellent,'' he says. ''I don't look at him and wonder because it makes perfect sense to me that he can run that fast with that technique.''

This weekend Tellez is lending his expertise to Australia's top mentors at a coaching conference in Melbourne.

Tellez says the biggest challenge for Australia is convincing the most talented natural athletes to try the sport and stick with it, as well as providing meaningful and regular competition for junior athletes and showing them a pathway to the elite level to keep them interested.

''The pool you can draw from is much smaller; it's all about getting the best talents into your sport and getting them early,'' he said.

"I AM CLEAN", Bolt

World record holder in 100 metres believes it will take time to convince some people he is running without aid of performance-enhancing drugs.

LONDON — The Associated Press

Published on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 3:00PM EDT

Olympic champion Usain Bolt believes it will take a couple of years to convince some people he is breaking world records without doping.

The 23-year-old Bolt broke his own marks in the 100 and 200 metres in August at the world championships in Berlin. He had originally set those two records at last year's Beijing Olympics, along with the world record in the 4x100 relay with Jamaica.

“I'll continue running fast, I am clean without a doubt,” Bolt said Thursday at a conservation event in London. “As soon as you start running fast there's going to be a problem. It's going to take a couple of years for people to start believing that you're actually clean.

“If you continue running fast and doing it clean and then, over a period of time, all the tainting will go away. People will continue to say it until that period of time.”

What hasn't helped Bolt convince doubters are doping convictions in recent years for sprinters Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin.

“People always say things, the sport has been through a lot. But it's changing, definitely,” Bolt said. “The IAAF is doing a very good job of cleaning up the sport.”

Gay failed a PED test do you now question Bolt's performances?