Usain Bolt celebrates in Beijing after breaking the 200m world record. Photo / Getty Images
You may not know the name Alan Bell but you will remember him. In fact, if your name is Usain Bolt you will struggle to forget him.
Bell was the starter who disqualified the Jamaican at last year's World Championship, and whose fingers will again be on the trigger when
the gun fires for the 100m and 200m finals at London 2012. Pressure? Well just a bit.
The 61-year-old is acknowledged as the world's leading starter, but appreciates the dangers of upstaging the world's most famous athletes. He leans back on a chair in the living room of his house on the outskirts of Carlisle, in the far north of England, and sighs wistfully. "Well, it's quite strange," he says. "I've become infamous because of that one incident. And, as an official, anywhere that you're working in the world you actually want to be anonymous. You don't enjoy any disqualification because you're in a situation where the athlete has worked hard to be on the track."
The hard graft the reigning Olympic 100m champion and world record-holder put in before the World Championship in Daegu last August was clear to see in the BBC1 documentary Usain Bolt: The Fastest Man Alive. So was his despair when he false-started in the 100m final.
Tellingly, Bolt was raging at his own stupidity in trying to beat the gun rather than at the one-strike-and-out false-start rule that prompted so much controversy after his disqualification.
