Usain Bolt & Asafa Powell Ends Track Season On High

So that's it, then. With a suitable finishing flourish in the home straight of the Stade Roi Baudouin, Usain Bolt eased his 6ft 5in frame past Asafa Powell to sign off his ground-breaking track season with a 100 metres win in the final Golden League meeting of the summer in Brussels last night.

It was a far from perfect performance by the 22-year-old Jamaican phenomenon, a triple gold medal winner and triple world record breaker at the Beijing Olympics last month. The last of the nine competitors to leave the blocks in the men's 100m, with a sluggish reaction time of 0.223sec, Bolt had to dig deep to claw his way past Powell in the last 20m – deeper than he had done in the Olympic final in the "Bird's Nest" stadium three weeks ago.

On that occasion, on a balmy Saturday evening in Beijing, the young man from Trelawny Parish could afford to put his foot on the brakes with some 15m remaining and still reduced his world record from 9.72 to 9.69. Last night, in chilly conditions and running into a 0.9 metres-per-second headwind, Bolt stopped the finish line clock at 9.77sec. Had the breeze been at his back, he would have broken his world record.

He did break one record, though – the track record. That stood at 9.84sec to Powell, who broke it himself as runner-up. Bolt's compatriot clocked 9.83sec as part of a Jamaican 1-2-3-4, with Nesta Carter third in 10.07sec and Michael Frater fourth in 10.08sec. Tyson Gay, the reigning world 100m and 200m champion from the United States, withdrew from the race on Thursday, not wishing to risk his troublesome hamstring in chilly conditions.

For Bolt, it was a more than satisfactory finish to a season in which he has taken a quantum leap from a sprinter of world-beating promise to the fastest sprinter of all time. "Asafa is a really fast guy," he reflected. "I'm getting used to chasing him." It was also a fine run by Powell, the 25-year-old enigma wrapped up in a yellow and green vest.

Powell may have won the Commonwealth 100m title at the Melbourne Cricket Ground two and a half years ago but at global level he has been consistently hit for six – well, for a couple of fives and a three, at any rate, having placed fifth in the last two Olympic finals and third at the World Championships in Osaka last summer.

Still, his record in Brussels has been remarkably consistent. Until last night he had been unbeaten on the Baudouin track, having won the 100m there in 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007. He was out injured in 2005.

Usain returns to Jamaica tomorrow.


The Reggae News Agency

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