A 100m showdown between good and evil – if only it were that simple

According to my new friends in the Rocinha favela, the best people to buy drugs off in Rio are the Amigos dos Amigos (aka the “ADA”, or “friends of friends”), not the rival drug trafficking gang the Red Command.

But then they would say that, wouldn’t they? The ADA control Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio, along with many other smaller ones, and reportedly win the support of the people through handouts, or throwing street parties, and they’re good guys; unlike their rivals, the Red Command, the bad guys, who they claim impose themselves more through violence.

This is not entirely unlike the backdrop to the latest 100m showdown between Usain Bolt and Justin Gatlin, otherwise known as the race between good and evil, hero against villain, or between the clean and the dirty, the truth and the lies.

Because, is it right to take sides in this instance, too?

Showdown

Either way, just like their showdown at the World Championships in Beijing last summer, for a race of just 100 metres, taking just over 40 strides and lasting just under 10 seconds, there appears to be a lot more riding on it than just a gold medal.

Because again, depending on who wins, there should either be an enormous sigh of right-minded relief, or else gasps of loathsome horror.

Right?

Well, it seems not everyone sees it that way, or least why Gatlin is still cast as the villain, and Bolt the hero. This may not be the ADA versus the Red Command, but in an event already flush with controversial turning points, it may mark another moment of irreversible damage to the credibility of athletics – if Gatlin wins.

Still, of all of the absurd expectations so far placed on Bolt, the most absurd was the idea he went into Beijing last summer as the man to save the sport. That Bolt won it – by a mere 0.01 of a second, remember – may have temporarily saved the sport, brought some a sort of salvation from the needle and the damage done, but it’s taken a lot more of a battering in the 12 months since.

Of course they’ll both need to progress to the final first, starting with tomorrow’s heats. Bolt, now 29 and already the first man in Olympic history to win the double sprint triple (Beijing in 2008, then London 2012) is now looking to make it a triple-triple. He has now won 40 of his 44 major 100m races since the start of 2008, and his 200m record in major finals now stands at 27-1. With the sole exception of the 2011 World Championships in Daegu (where he false-started in the 100m), he’s consistently delivered his season’s best in the final (including in Beijing last summer).

Gatlin, now 34, and some 10 years on from committing a second doping offence, is running as fast as ever. He won the American Olympic trials in 9.80 seconds, looking wonderfully smooth, and boasts a 100 per cent record this year, seven wins in as many races; Bolt’s best this year is the 9.88 he ran in the heat of their trials, before withdrawing from the final with a hamstring injury.

Bolt did prove his fitness in winning the 200m at the London Diamond League last month, and even if he’s unlikely to touch his world record of 9.58, set in 2009, there is still the sense this is definitely Bolt’s race to lose.

Gatlin continues to display little remorse for his doping offences and even if there is the reasonable possibility he’s currently running clean, there is some evidence to suggest he may still be benefiting from his dirty past.

There is, however, that still-worrying backdrop of Jamaica’s own anti-doping record, particularly the gaping absence of out-of-competition testing in the five months prior to the London Olympics, which resulted in the resignation of their anti-doping chief.

Jamaican sprinters won eight of the 12 individual sprint medals available in London, and the following year, five of their top sprinters tested positive – including former 100m world record holder Asafa Powell and double Olympic 200m champion Veronica Campbell-Brown.

Bolt himself is now in danger of losing the gold medal he won with the Jamaican 4x100m relay team at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, after the recent retesting of samples found that one member of that team, Nester Carter, should have been originally expelled after testing positive for a banned stimulant.

What Bolt has going for him more than any other world-beating sprinter of his generation is his squeaky-clean doping record, which may not actually carry as much weight as it once did, although it’s a good place to start – at least according to my old friends in Jamaica. Men’s 100m final: Saturday 22.25 (Monday 02.25 Irish time)