Usain Bolt And Lance Armstrong: Two Sports, Same Controversy

Success in sport today seems to lead to only one conclusion, drugs.

Ross Tucker of The Science of Sport website took a look at Bolt’s 19.59 effort in Lousanne over 200m, and how truly spectacular it was. According to Tucker, if you were to take his margin of victory of .82 seconds over 400m Olympic gold medalist LaShawn Merritt, and extrapolated the 4.2% margin of victory to an 800m race, Bolt would have won by five seconds. Picture a world-class race of all the top 800m runners looking to set PRs and the winner finishing 50m ahead of the field; that is esentially what Bolt did.

Now here come the speculators. Is Bolt on drugs or not? Fans have begun comparing Bolt’s domination to that of Lance Armstrong during the early part of this decade in the Tour de France. Many observers believe that any athlete who so dominates his sport must be taking drugs. Others believe that if one athlete can achieve dominance without drugs, then all dominant athletes should be free of suspicion except when there is a specific cause for doubt. But, according to Tucker, lumping athletes like Bolt and Armstrong together, instead of treating them as individual cases, is complete nonsense. Could both be guilty of taking drugs? Of course they could, but Tucker is only right to say that whatever one of them is doing or has done has no necessary implication for the other.

For More: The Science of Sport