The brilliance of Usain Bolt, Mo Farah and Wayde Van Niekerk

Wayde Van Niekerk sets new world record

By Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson ,

During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson has been discussing the track-and-field events. Part one, on Caster Semenya and Olympic economics, can be read here.

Nicholas Thompson: Welcome back! I imagine that, as a part-British, part-Jamaican national, you’re probably in a good mood. (And you’re from Canada, too, which got a bronze in the men’s hundred metres.)

Malcolm Gladwell: A big day for my peoples! I know—or, rather, I hope—that we will return in much more detail to the question of Jamaican dominance. But can I just repeat—for the millionth time—the fact that this is a country of 2.7 million people? On Saturday night, I watched the swimming four-by-one-hundred-metre medley relays, where both the American women and men won the gold—beating countries like the U.K., Australia, and, wait for it, Denmark, population 5.6 million. In both cases, there were post-race interviews, with the winning Americans bubbling over about how wonderful they are. Fine. But just once—once—I would love for a winning U.S. relay-team member to be honest enough to say, in answer to the question of why they won: “Well, we’ve got about three hundred and fifteen million more people than the Danes, so that’s a pretty big advantage.” I’ve often thought, as a non-American, that the motto of the U.S. Olympic team should be “Excellence Without Humility.” So, let me repeat one more time, as we celebrate the magnificent wins of Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson in the women’s hundred metres and Usain Bolt in the men’s hundred metres, and as we await the sprint relays next weekend: Jamaica. Half the size of Denmark.

N.T.: Fair enough! I wouldn’t mind a little more humility from the U.S. swimmers. And the Jamaican sprinters are captivating; Elaine Thompson gets my vote for the best celebration so far. In fact, it’s hard not to appreciate the whole country’s devotion to track, which, as I understand it, may contribute to what social scientists call “The Jamaica Paradox,” referring to the country’s unusually long life expectancy for its relatively low income level.

M.G.: Jamaica reminds us, I think, that we have to stop using income as a proxy for all good things. I once read this wonderful (and somewhat whimsical) essay by a Jamaican literary scholar arguing that one of the reasons that Jamaica does so well at running is that it has no snakes (yes, Jamaica is a hundred per cent snake-free), which means that children can run barefoot with impunity. I’m not sure how seriously to take that. But as a metaphor I think it speaks volumes. Jamaica is poor and, in places, violent and deeply dysfunctional. But it also comes pretty close, in a lot of ways, to paradise.

N.T.: Still, your comment about the swimmers reminded me of my favorite stat from these Olympics: Michael Phelps, population of one, from Baltimore, population six hundred and twenty thousand, has won more gold medals than all but about forty countries, in their entire history. He’s won more than India, more than Argentina, and, yes, more than Jamaica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIiDMWecuQI

Now, this is slightly misleading. Obviously, the Olympics are biased toward swimmers. (If Usain Bolt could run four different styles, he might win eight medals each Olympics.) And it’s not to say that I think Michael Phelps is the greatest athlete ever. As an American, I’d gladly trade him and a first-round draft pick to Argentina for Lionel Messi. Still, as a friend of mine may have said in our last chat, the foundation of sports is “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” And if we use medal counts as a metric then there’s no denying the relative brilliance of Michael Phelps, even if he, and some of his teammates, can be a little ungracious.

But before we drown in a debate about swimming, let’s move to the track, and the men’s ten thousand metres on Friday night. It was almost an exact repeat of last year’s World Championship. Did you know that Mo Farah was going to win one lap into the race, or did it take two?

M.G.: It was an honest race! What was the last five thousand—13:12? For those who aren’t rabid track fans, let me explain. The second half of Saturday night’s ten thousand was run at a pace that would have won the national championships in the five thousand metres in all but three or four countries in the world. I am old enough to remember when 13:12 was the world record for the five thousand metres!

They were flying. And, I think, if you had polled the top runners in the race beforehand, they would have agreed that that was the best way to beat Farah: with a long, hard, sustained second half. So what happened? He won anyway. It’s possible he’s unbeatable at this point.

N.T.: I disagree! None of the main contenders in that race has any chance of beating Farah in a five thousand. They’re relatively better at longer distances, and he’s relatively better at shorter distances; so the optimal strategy was to make the racing part of the race as long as possible. By taking it slowly for the first two or three miles, they essentially turned it into a five thousand, or maybe a seven thousand. The ideal strategy would have been to take it out hard from the very beginning. Running hard from the gun would have maximized Farah’s difficulty and it’s the best way to put yourself in a good position if something strange happens—like Farah falling, as happened Saturday night.

Now, it’s quite possible that my hard-from-lap-one strategy would have failed, too. The one man in the race who has defeated Farah recently—Geoffrey Kamworor, who beat him in a half marathon—had nothing Saturday night. He ran only a tiny bit slower in later miles of the 2015 New York City Marathon than he did in the first five thousand metres of this weekend’s race. And he still ran out of gas well before the finishing kicks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJse8STkKww

M.G.: Hmmmm. Farah’s winning time was 27:05. Only four runners in the world ran faster than that last year—and most of those times were recorded in the highly-curated, élite “Diamond League” meets, where the runners are quietly and efficiently ushered through the early stages of the race by rabbits. And, by the way, all the runners who were beaten by Farah in those slightly faster races last year were beaten by him again in this year’s slightly slower version. I am reminded of what the famously laconic San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich often says, in answer to post-game questions about what his team needs to do to play better: “Make more shots.” We are basically at the point where the only productive advice we can give Farah’s opponents is to run faster than him.

N.T.: I think we really need to give credit to Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar, for pioneering a new way of training, one that maximizes both strength (the ability to run a fast, smooth pace) and speed (the ability to run a blazing fast last quarter-mile). And for keeping Farah at his prime, mentally and physically, at every championship. The failure of Kamworor is a reminder of just how hard it is to peak at the right moment. I actually think this is an underappreciated element of Farah’s excellence. As anyone who has run competitively at any level knows, it is a sport in which you are constantly managing small injuries and aches and pains. Knowing when to rest, and when to train through that little ache in your quad, is a skill, and one at which Farah obviously excels.

Let’s step back now, though, and talk about Caster Semenya. We got some criticism online for our previous conversation about her. One of the critiques was “How can you celebrate Caitlyn Jenner, but say that Semenya shouldn’t run?” The interesting thing is that this makes the point precisely. If Bruce Jenner had decided to transition in 1976, I would hope that everyone would have given her complete respect and lots of love. But she shouldn’t have been allowed to race in the women’s events. Bruce’s results in the decathalon that year would have won him gold in every women’s event except the discus, shot put, and fifteen hundred metres. There are huge advantages in running and jumping that come from having male testosterone levels.

M.G.: Here’s the thing: the sentiment behind a lot of the criticism we got is absolutely correct. The way that the Semenya situation has been handled by the governing bodies of track and field has been a mess. This should never have been played out in public, in a way that humiliated Semenya. (I was going to say that track was the worst run of all professional sports. But then I remembered Roger Goodell and the N.F.L).

But the point we were both trying to make, I think, is that athletics are the one area where social norms about gender are simply not useful. The Jenner analogy is an apt one. I absolutely support Caitlyn Jenner’s decision to be the person she wants to be. But if she was twenty-six, and in her prime as an athlete, she could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to compete as a woman. Gender categories in sports derive from biological facts, not from social norms. We don’t have separate men’s and women’s competition in spelling bees, because there is no compelling biological reason to do so. We do have them in sports, because on the track or in the gym there absolutely is. By the way, when Matt Lauer interviewed Jenner on the golf course recently, the first question he asked her (naturally) was whether she now plays from the women’s tee. Jenner—who has a handicap of five—said, “Of course I do.” And Lauer blurted out, “That’s not fair!” And he’s right! That’s not fair!

N.T.: Another point that interests me: after these games, assuming Semenya wins gold in the eight hundred metres, and perhaps in the four hundred metres, too, I think you’ll see even more doping in women’s middle-distance running.

M.G.: I agree. If there was ever any doubt about the performance-enhancing effects of higher levels of testosterone, it has now been removed. This brings me to the women’s ten thousand metres. This was, at least on paper, one of the greatest distance-running feats ever. Almaz Ayana broke the record—which was considered one of the most unbreakable records on the books—by fourteen seconds.

N.T.: She would have, I’m sorry to note, beaten Canada’s entrant in the men’s race by fifteen seconds.

M.G.: I’m going to ignore that. So what happened? Immediately, a cascade of very prominent athletes and coaches—openly and derisively—stated that they found the performance literally unbelievable and called Ayana a doper. Compare this to the men’s ten thousand, a day later. The idea that Farah’s performance might be tainted was nowhere near the dominant media narrative.

Mo Farah does it again

This is where we are headed in track and field. The biology of men and women means that doping will almost always have a bigger performance effect in women than in men. We know that Ben Johnson, when he set his world record in the hundred metres, was a doper. But that record has long since been eclipsed by other runners, at least some of whom probably never doped at all. (For the record, I think Bolt is clean.) On the women’s side, the world record is 10:49, set by Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988—the same year Johnson won his gold. While she never failed a drug test, most track experts consider Flo-Jo to have almost certainly been a steroid user, and most experts think her world record will never be beaten by anyone who isn’t similarly chemically enhanced. The point is that doping—and, for that matter, genetic variability—is a far, far bigger issue for women than for men. That’s what Ross Tucker means when he calls women a “protected category.” The women’s side of athletic competition can be destroyed by doping in a way that’s simply not going to happen with men. And that’s exactly what happened on Friday night. We witnessed one of the greatest performances in running history—and we had no idea whether to react with awe or with disdain. When sports lose their legitimacy, they die. We are very close to that point in women’s running.

N.T.: Personally, I’m heartbroken. As you remember, last year, I was euphoric in praising the racing of Genzebe Dibaba. But she’s coached by Jama Aden, who was recently arrested in Spain; police raided his hotel room and reportedly found EPO, syringes, and other banned substances. Meanwhile, one of his former runners, the American David Torrence, said that he stopped working with Aden after being repeatedly pressured to inject “vitamins.” Aden has proclaimed his innocence, and he deserves his day in court, but, as fans, we get to decide whom we trust and root for and whom we don’t. Ayana has denied doping, but I have a hard time trusting her—her time in the ten thousand, we should note, surpassed a mark set by a Chinese runner who reportedly later admitted participating in a state-sponsored doping program. This year, I got no joy at all watching Dibaba close her semifinal in the women’s fifteen hundred metres in a ridiculous fifty-seven seconds.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made to the men’s long jump, pointed out to me by our cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, a track freak, who created a system in the nineteen-seventies to measure expected times for a runner at different distances. He notes that the winner last night jumped just over twenty-seven feet, or two feet less than the world-record holder. In fact, the length of the winning jump has been in a close-to-continuous decline since 1984. Is that because doping has become less prevalent in the event? If it has, it shows one of the other side effects of doping: it makes future, clean, winners seem less impressive.

M.G.: I actually had this same thought last night, as I watched the long jump. The jumps looked more like a late-nineteen-eighties N.C.A.A. championship than the Olympics.

N.T.: And Usain Bolt? There’s no point in rooting for anyone else. Justin Gatlin seemed to prepare perfectly—he didn’t blitz his semifinals like he did last year—and he got a marvellous start. But he still wasn’t close. Bolt will win the two hundred, and Jamaica’s going to win the relay, because the Americans apparently rub olive oil on their hands before every meet and they’re going to drop the baton.

He unstoppable….Usain Bolt

M.G.: The greatest moment involving Bolt last night was actually when he was walking out of the stadium tunnel, on his way to the final, and the camera briefly caught his reaction to Wayde Van Niekerk’s insane four-hundred-metre victory. It was one of those priceless moment of recognition when one of the greatest athletes of all time finally—finally—sees a performer as sublime as himself. He covered his mouth with his hand and did a kind of half circle. It was half shock, half joy. My favorite Olympic moment so far.

N.T.: I completely agree. Bolt, as is so often the case, seemed wonderfully human in that moment. And here’s one race I’d like to see: Van Niekerk against Bolt in the two hundred metres. Van Niekerk ran a 43:03 in the four hundred last night, to smash the world record, and he did it from lane eight, meaning he didn’t have the benefit of watching anyone ahead of him. He’s the first athlete ever to go under ten seconds for the one hundred, under twenty for the two hundred, and under forty-four for the four hundred. He doesn’t just look exceptionally fast, he looks as smooth as Bolt. But, alas, he’s not running the two hundred in Rio.

Still, there’s a lot to look forward to: I’m particularly eager to watch David Rudisha—the most graceful runner I’ve ever seen—in the eight hundred, and the forty-one-year-old Bernard Lagat in the five thousand. It’s hard to imagine him, or anyone, besting Mo Farah. But Lagat is an inspiration for anyone who has aged out of what are generally considered his or her prime running years.