Athletics: Lightning Bolt will be gone in flash

Losing Usain Bolt will create an incalculable emptiness for athletics.

Oliver Brown reflects on the world's fastest man bowing out while still at the top.

To see Usain Bolt in the flesh is to witness fame at its most celestial. If we take an old acting analogy, he chews up the scenery. Entire evenings of track and field are sucked up into the swirling vortex of this one-man show.

When he won his second Olympic 100 metres title in 2012, the stroboscopic blaze of flashbulbs lit up the night like a meteor shower. "Who's No1?" he yelled, staring down the lens. "Who's still a legend? Who is it? Me. No1, every day, all day. Believe me."

Nobody but Bolt can entertain that level of hubris and avoid reproach. It is not merely that he backs up his swagger with eye-popping performances, but the grandstanding is of a piece with his infectious Jamaican party-boy act.

Once, he joked he loved the anonymity of London, as an antidote to the hordes of admirers he would have to fend off in Asia. The summer of 2012 changed all that. Three gold medals later, he was pictured celebrating his efforts with half the Swedish women's handball team.

As ever with Bolt, it is the unaffected charm that guarantees him devotion wherever he goes.

Limbering up for his 200 metres heat at the London Olympics, he won lusty cheers by giving his hat away to a teenage volunteer in his lane. There could be no more fitting stage, then, on which to take his bow as an athlete at the world athletics championships tomorrow (NZ time).

For when it comes to Bolt and London, it is a reciprocal kind of love.

The next 10 days are likely to be remembered as a festival of farewells. Quite apart from Bolt making London 2017 his sign-off moment, en route to a long and languorous Caribbean retirement, Sir Mo Farah is also choosing the stadium that defined his body of work to streak off into the sunset.

Losing history's finest sprinter and most consistent distance runner in just 10 days? It will create an incalculable emptiness for athletics. Farah is poised to sign for a series of highly lucrative marathon appearances as he switches to road racing. In some ways, it will be the longest goodbye tour since Frank Sinatra's.

For Bolt, however, there is no epilogue planned. Despite Justin Gatlin's prediction that he could be tempted, la Michael Phelps in swimming, to make a comeback, the man himself is adamant that his decision to step away is irrevocable. He turns 31 this month, and since 2012 his winning times have, however imperceptibly, been slowing.

He was down to 9.77 in Moscow by 2013, 9.79 in Beijing last year, and 9.80 in Rio last summer. In a race as hair-trigger as the 100 metres, Bolt recognises that his own gradual downward arc will soon intersect with the upward trajectory of his rivals. Better to depart now, he reasons, than to countenance the indignity of being deposed.

It is unlikely, health permitting, that he will be threatened in London. Canada's gifted Andre de Grasse, Bolt's main challenger, has withdrawn with a hamstring tear, while the ageing, twice-banned Gatlin looks a spent force and also has a habit of choking on the big occasion.

After the next 40 seconds of running, spanning three rounds of the 100 metres and relay, Bolt will morph into an ex-athlete, most likely with his supremacy intact.

Even members of his inner sanctum seem unsure how he intends to fill his days from there. After all, athletics, unlike tennis or golf, is not a sport that the best can keep pursuing at leisure into their dotage.

"Track and field is the only sport where no one says, 'You know what, let's go out to the track for a run'," he says. "I think I will be playing football most of the time."

One could hardly begrudge him the luxury. Bolt has managed a decade as athletics' one unadulterated good thing, a smiling, magnetic force of nature in times of acute strife for the sport.

The spectacle of London 2017 should be less a cause for sorrow that he is leaving than for a celebration of all that he has given.

Bolt's records

9.58 sec: Bolt's 100m world record, set at the 2009 world championships in Berlin.
19.19 sec: His 200m record from the same championships.
36.84 sec: He holds a complete set of sprint world records after Jamaica's relay efforts at the London 2012 Olympics.
27.79mph: Bolt's fastest recorded speed on the track. It was measured from his time of 1.61 seconds: The 60-to-80m split in his record 100m run in Berlin.
8 Olympic gold medals on Bolt's record. He lost another from the 4x100m relay at Beijing 2008 when team-mate Nesta Carter failed a retrospective drugs test.
11 world titles.
4 times Bolt has been named Laureus World Sportsman of the Year.
6 he has been named IAAF Male Athlete of the Year half a dozen times.