It’s been six years, 11 months and 29 days since Usain Bolt finished his very last competitive race, when he came in third behind Justin Gatlin at the world championship 100m final in London back in the summer of 2017. But you can still see him round about the sport. He’s there in the boxes listing the world and Olympic records at the top of the official start lists, he’s there again when those same times come up on the digital scoreboards at the finish line to remind you what the people you’re watching are falling short of, he’s there in the montages of great moments that they play on the giant screens before the start of the session.
But most of all, you notice him simply because he’s missing. You wonder whether World Athletics wouldn’t sometimes have preferred it if he stayed that way, given the way he talks about the sport in interviews. “I think the sport now is maybe just missing a superstar. I mean, when I left people were looking for the next person who is going to step up and really shine and stand out. I think that’s what the sport is missing right now,” he said in one last year.
“Track and field needs the attention because I think it goes under the radar since I retired,” he said in another. “I love the competitions but track and field needs to evolve.”
What about 70,000 fans in the Stade got, instead, was one of the great runs from the 24-year-old Femke Bol, who hauled the Dutch team to victory in the mixed 4x400m relay all by herself. Bol was in fourth place when she got the baton, but unspooled a 47.93 split that swept her past Great Britain’s Amber Anning, Belgium’s Naomi Van Den Broeck and finally, as she came down the home straight, the USA’s Kaylyn Brown. Well, Bol’s only a “t” off. And her showdown with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in the 400m hurdles will be one of the must-see events of this championship.
But even so, Saturday night at the stadium proved Bolt’s point. His shadow is so long that it still just about covers the action in the Stade de France. The sport is still trying to figure out exactly how to manage without him while it waits for someone else to come along and take his place.
He wasn’t the only big name missing on Saturday. The entire programme had been arranged around the idea that the French could emulate the Super Saturday of 2012, when Great Britain won three gold medals in one evening. “We may not win three in a row, as the Brits did,” said the Games’ head of athletics, Alain Blondel. “But the aim is to have the crowd enjoying the French athletes from the opening morning, and it will be like a wheel rolling until the end of the competition. We want to have the Stade de France shaking like at London 2012.” Well, plenty else has gone right for the French at these Games so far.
The weekend had been arranged so that Kevin Mayer, their two-time world champion, would win a medal in the decathlon, which was the last event on track. But Mayer never made it to the start line. He pulled out injured on Monday. “Everyone told me it would be a shame for me to collapse 20 metres after the start at the Stade de France,” Mayer said, “when my goal was to make the whole place shake.”
On top of that, one of the more startling sights of the night was the empty set of blocks in lane five of the second semi-final of the women’s 100m, where Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was supposed to be. Fraser-Pryce is 37, and was trying to become the first athlete in Olympic history to win a fifth medal in the same event after her golds in Beijing and London, her bronze in Rio and silver in Tokyo. But she was scratched from the race right before it was due to start. There was no ready explanation, only a DNS next to her name on the big screen. Half an hour later, word spread on social media that she was injured.
The event was already missing the two-time champion Elaine Thompson-Herah, who pulled out injured last month, while Shericka Jackson, who completed the Jamaican 1-2-3 in Tokyo, withdrew earlier this week. Which left the USA’s Sha’Carri Richardson as the one major star left in the race. And of course she was beaten by Julien Alfred, the 23-year-old from the little city of Castries in St Lucia. It was St Lucia’s first medal, which is one of the great Olympic stories. The problem for World Athletics was that it wasn’t even one they chose to tell in Sprint, their recent behind-the-scenes Netflix series profiling the contenders for the event.
That show was one of several attempts World Athletics have made to evolve in the way Bolt, and other great household names in the sport such as Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, have told them they need to do. That mixed relay, which made its Olympic debut in Tokyo three years ago, is another, and so were the repechage races earlier in the day. They’ve decided to junk the fastest-losers rule, and give everyone who missed out on automatic qualification from the heats a chance to run again. It’s supposed to make the sport more straightforward, more important, and means they can fit more races in for TV.
Bol’s run was a reminder that for all the gimmicks, what they really need is for their star athletes to deliver.
