RIO DE JANEIRO — Over to you, Usain Bolt, and the bar is even higher than usual.Michael Phelps and Bolt have been an Olympic one-two punch since 2008 in Beijing, where Bolt emerged to tear up the track while Phelps was already an absolute ruler in the pool.
On Saturday they will overlap briefly once more, with Phelps, now 31, finishing up one of the most remarkable meets of his career, and with Bolt, fast approaching 30, launching his meet with the first round of the 100 meters
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Neither had anything left to prove when they arrived here. Phelps was already the greatest swimmer of all time. Bolt was already the greatest sprinter. But that has not stopped Phelps from pushing himself to more gold medals against new and familiar rivals. And it will not stop Bolt from doing his falsely nonchalant best to hold off old foes like Justin Gatlin and young threats like Trayvon Bromell, who are hungry to chase him down before he sprints into the sunset.Usain Bolt, left, won the gold medal in the 200 meters in Beijing in 2008. Michael Phelps added to his Olympic record by winning the 200 meter
There are rumblings about the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 for Phelps, who came out of retirement in 2014. Bolt, who has said Rio will be his last Olympics, has been an unreliable source on his plans in the past.
But this certainly looks like last call, and the Games will not be the same without them. It takes a decade of succeeding under biggest-race pressure to become this level of must-watch Olympian.Bolt dominates his field in a way that is unique in living memory and has achieved a global celebrity that is almost comparable to Pelé and Muhammad Ali,” said Tony Collins, a British sports historian. “Phelps’s achievement at the Olympics is unlikely ever to be matched. The sheer enormity of his medal haul, not to mention his non-Olympic record, makes him the greatest Olympian of all time.
“But the Olympics have entered very turbulent waters. As with the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics are increasingly weighed down by scandal, hubris and existential doubt. Whether they can continue in their current form is open to question, and that means that we may never again witness athletes dominating global tournaments in the same way as Bolt and Phelps.”
The glass-half-full crowd could argue quite rightly that the Olympics, warts and all, have proved resilient enough to overcome wars, boycotts and doping scandals every bit as big as the state-sponsored Russian affair that dominated the conversation in the run-up to the Rio Games.
Other dominant athletes will inevitably emerge: driven characters like the American swimmer Katie Ledecky, who at 19 is just getting started. But the odds do seem long on getting the two best of all time at the same time again in the major Olympic sports of track and swimming.
They are beneficiaries of their historical timing. Others might have approached their Olympic numbers if they had been able to keep competing, but Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals in swimming in 1972, retired at 22. Jesse Owens, the track and field star, only took part in one Olympics in 1936.With Phelps and Bolt continuing to work in different mediums, it is still not the most straightforward game of compare and contrast.
“It’s hard to compare water and land,” said John Smith, the veteran American track coach. “But my view is for an athlete when you are dealing with gravity, it’s a little harder. When you are dealing with buoyancy, it’s a little easier.”
Aquatic types can certainly disagree, but running a straightaway seems to hold more universal appeal than doing laps in a pool. There is no debate that Phelps has always had the edge in medals and Bolt the edge in charisma.So it remains as Bolt’s inimitable pre-Olympic press event — full of samba and shenanigans — made clear. But Phelps, long viewed as something of an automaton internationally, has also narrowed the personality gap in Rio. He has not only continued to win, but has also opened up and connected more directly with his public in the wake of his personal struggles.
Unlike Phelps, Bolt has not lost an Olympic race since 2008, sweeping the 100 and the 200 and the 4x100 relay with Jamaica in Beijing and then in London in 2012.
Nor has he been beaten at the world championships during that span, his only loss coming when he was disqualified after a false start in the 100 in 2011 in Daegu, South Korea.
But his mathematical edge has been shrinking and his world-record times from 2009 of 9.58 seconds in the 100 and 19.19 in the 200 are receding in the rearview mirror. His winning times in major championships in the 100 since 2009 are 9.63, 9.77 and 9.79.
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This decline is reassuring in a sense in a track world understandably full of suspicion about doping and Jamaica’s testing program. But it also makes him look beatable, and defeat could not have been closer than at the world championships in Beijing last year, when only Gatlin’s late stumble allowed Bolt to eke out a victory in the 100 by one-hundredth of a second.
In Rio, he again comes into a big meet having raced little and with lingering doubts about his health. But Ato Boldon, the NBC analyst and former sprinter who predicted Bolt’s demise in the 100 in Beijing, watched Bolt train and start this week and said he believed Bolt was “fine” physically and deserved to be the favorite in Rio.Nothing has changed in my mind,” Boldon said Friday. “The rounds will reveal a lot, but no one can get away from Bolt far enough to escape his finish in the 100. In the 200, well, forget it.”
And if Bolt ever finds himself short of inspiration in Rio, he need only to picture Phelps in Rio: reaching the wall first and setting the standard again for enduring excellence.
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