Bolt's 9.58

I guess anything is possible, 2008/9 there were several Jamaicans who made similar amazing improvements.

SAFP - 11.31 - 10.78

Kerron Stewart 11.03 - 10.80

Nesta Cartaer - 9.91 - 9.78

Johan Blake 10.27 - 9.93

Melaine Walker 54.14 - 52.62 (400h)

Athletes like Brigitte Foster-Hylton in her mid-30s, had her best year in 2008.

Athletes do have breakout seasons.

Impressive wrote:

Taking the percentage that Bolt eventually bettered the old 100m WR of 9.74 with his 9.58 run, and doing the same to the current track records shows you how astonishing the guy really is.

The guy transformed himself, again as he ages. Huh.... Seem legit.

Can we be sure the IAAF would sanction on of their most visible athletes? The Russian scandal shows never testing positive is for sale at the highest levels of the IAAF.

Good thing JADCO has a long and active history of anti-doping activity.

9.58-9.74 is about the same gap as Bekele to the field in the 10k. Might even be a bigger gap now between Farah and the field.

Funny to see this post today. Last night I watched a documentary about Lance and was struck by many of the parallels between his case and Bolt's.

The it's-too-good-to-be-true performances, which raise suspicion, which is met with rationalizations about how these athletes have managed to transcend the entire sport (the cancer made Lance leaner, he pedals in a low gear, Bolt is really tall, he eats yams, he's Babe Ruth--my favorite analogy, courtesy of the brothers Johnson, which is so absurd and ill-thought that it would be a waste a time to refute), as well as strident rebukes of anyone who doesn't believe because they don't believe in dreams and the potential of the human spirit.

The main difference seems to be that there were a few journalists who dogged Lance and dug up some of the details of his use. They were hung out to dry for a long time but eventually they were vindicated. I don't think Bolt has come under the same journalistic scrutiny. As far as I recall, no one has gone sniffing around his camp, or probed more deeply into the Jamaican testing protocols, or tried to flip someone on the inside.

I think the last few years of Bolt's career are rather curious. I assume the truth will come out eventually--it always does. Too many people involved for it not to.

At the moment, short of conclusive proof, for you to believe that Bolt is clean, you have to believe that he is Bob Beamon to the third power. Just go through the list of guys behind him--pretty much all of them have been busted for doping or somehow implicated. Yet he's faster than them all by such a staggering amount and he's clean? We're in some unicorn fantasy realm with that claim.

You talk sense, but unless he is caught cheating I like to believe he is clean. There haven't even been any half decent claims against him, unlike Lance who had to constantly respond to claims people KNEW he was doping.

Nobody can believe that Bolt is just the product of great talent and great training?

Impressive wrote:

You talk sense, but unless he is caught cheating I like to believe he is clean. There haven't even been any half decent claims against him, unlike Lance who had to constantly respond to claims people KNEW he was doping.

Nobody can believe that Bolt is just the product of great talent and great training?

Except that the Jamaican's adopted the BALCO protocols right before a decade long domination of all sprint events.

I wouldn't say that there haven't been half decent claims. There's been a lot of smoke in his camp with the positive tests. And there has been the renunication of the Jamaican testing protocol. Sort of like with Lance, where all his former teammates kept getting popped.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2527674/Usain-Bolt-dominates-landscape-failed-drug-tests-turn-Jamaica-island-broken-dreams.html

The only thing Bolt and Armstrong have in common is their dominance. Nothing else.

SD102 wrote:

The only thing Bolt and Armstrong have in common is their dominance. and their use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Nothing else.

fixed.

Honestly, that article, along with a good 60% of the Mails 'content' is media spinning at its finest.

There is no smoke in Bolts camp. Yohan got done for something similar to a banned stimulant, hence only the 3 month ban. These aren't the steroids etc that I would think Bolt would be taking if he is cheating.

Whether he is or isn't, certainly there is no real claims or evidence to suggest he is. That Mail article tries to get some kind of implication going based on the fact that other Jamaican sprinters have been caught. They don't even train with Bolt.

ddadadaads wrote:

...

At the moment, short of conclusive proof, for you to believe that Bolt is clean, you have to believe that he is Bob Beamon to the third power. Just go through the list of guys behind him--pretty much all of them have been busted for doping or somehow implicated. Yet he's faster than them all by such a staggering amount and he's clean? We're in some unicorn fantasy realm with that claim.

Isn't it just as fantastic to presume he's doping because he is so far ahead of the field? What drug do you suppose he's taking that changed him from a 10.03 sprinter to a 9.58 guy, a guy who is faster than all the guys (doping) behind him by such a staggering amount?

These guys are clearly thinking they'll do whatever they can to run faster .. so it's not like they're gunna pass up the heavy juice and just aim for the bronze medal. Yet you think Usain alone has found the magic juice that no other doper on the planet takes, and it bolsters his 100m time by nearly half a second?

I don't think Bolt is a cheater. The guy ran a 19.93 as an 18 year old! Is it that hard to believe someone with that kind of talent could run world records after a few more years of growth and serious training? He's clearly a freak of nature and that's that.

I'm not quite sure I understand. I'm not disputing that Usain is enormously talented and probably the best sprinter clean. I'm just saying that there's no way he's running those times clean.

Here we go again.

What is Bolt on? Don't know.

What do we know?

Recent history of JADCO is so bad nobody dare put it in print. Ideally, this is actually being corrected.

IAAF sells 'never tested positive.'. You can even get a partial refund if the service is bad.

IOC sports can and do hide positives. There is no rule against this.

What can possibly go wrong when the sport's promoters also are the anti-doping authority?

Bolt has somewhat transcended the sport like a few others who ended up doping.

Therefore, no confidence in his performances. None.

He was always f*cking fast wrote:

I don't think Bolt is a cheater. The guy ran a 19.93 as an 18 year old! Is it that hard to believe someone with that kind of talent could run world records after a few more years of growth and serious training? He's clearly a freak of nature and that's that.

Again, no one is disputing that he's enormously talented. Everyone was on the Lance is a freak of nature bandwagon, too. And the Barry Bonds is a freak of nature bandwagon. But take a real close look at the record progression for the 100 meters. And then put an asterisk next to the dopers. In your world, Bolt isn't a freak of nature. He's a living superhero with mystical powers.

dsfsdf wrote:

He was always f*cking fast wrote:

I don't think Bolt is a cheater. The guy ran a 19.93 as an 18 year old! Is it that hard to believe someone with that kind of talent could run world records after a few more years of growth and serious training? He's clearly a freak of nature and that's that.

But take a real close look at the record progression for the 100 meters. And then put an asterisk next to the dopers. In your world, Bolt isn't a freak of nature. He's a living superhero with mystical powers.

Yes I do believe that. Unless you think he's been doping his entire life, it's no surprise he's run as fast as he has. None of the other world record holders, doping or not, ever had the junior career Bolt did. Trying to compare him to runners of the past doesn't work because no one else was like him.

Let's just agree to disagree. I remember having the exact same arguments on this board about Barry Bonds and Lance, etc. We won't know until it leaks.

I think he was probably clean running 19.92 as a junior. I could believe that natural progression would take him into the high 19.5s. I think that's about where the clean world record would be. I think that's pretty astounding progression. The world junior record book is full of prospects who matured early and never realized their full potential, so for him to make that kind of leap clean, I think it would have been pretty special.

I feel pretty confident MJ was doped, as was Blake. I guess by my thinking Dix isn't clean either.

Look, I admit this all conjecture. But it's based on the incontrovertible fact that doping is prevelant in the sport, and all the clean tests in the world don't mean a thing. As a result, there are limits to what I believe, and in my view, Bolt way exceeds those limits.

Re: "Isn't it just as fantastic to presume he's doping because he is so far ahead of the field? " - Isn't that the exact same reason everyone 'presumes' FloJo was doping.

That is pretty wild, but the WR was not 9.74 when Bolt ran 9.58. It was 9.69. He broke it twice prior to 9.58. With 9.72 and 9/69 , both in '08

So your scale is a tad off