Just what is it that separates a champion athlete from the also-rans? Natural talent, hard work and determination are all essential, but athletes and coaches are becoming increasingly aware of the crucial role diet plays in sporting success.
The most amazing thing I saw in this most amazing sports year was not especially important or historic or even decisive. No one won a medal at the end of it, no trophy, no championship, no world record. There were no playbooks involved, no chalkboards, no swimsuits, no balls, no bats, no clubs, no rackets. The man who performed the miracle was only doing what every child does, and at the end of it he seemed utterly unimpressed with himself. He would become world famous, but that was later.
Sports Illustrated will announce its choice for Sportsman of the Year on Dec. 2. Here's one of the nominations for that honor by an SI writer. For more essays, click here.
Last week, SI.com caught up with nine-time gold medalist Carl Lewis at the Audi Best Buddies Challenge, a charity bicycle tour and fundraising event to help people with intellectual disabilities. Lewis weighed in on everything from Usain Bolt's record-breaking performance in Beijing to Team USA fumbling the baton in the relays.
Running is a sport where relative success matters. A single group of striving runners can contain an individual for whom running at the pace of the pack is an act of utter laziness, and next to him or her, an individual for whom keeping up with that same pack is a heroic effort.
BEIJING -- That's why they run the races, and throw the disks and jump the bars. So that, with the taste of gold on their tongues, Lolo Jones can heartbreakingly hit the ninth hurdle, and Sanya Richards can tie up with 80 meters to go in the 400. So that Tyson Gay can get knocked out in the semifinals and miss the baton in the 4x100, and so that Stephanie Brown Trafton, who finished third at the U.S. Olympic Trials, can use her first throw to win the first U.S. gold in women's discus in 76 years.
Just what is it that separates a champion athlete from the also-rans? Natural talent, hard work and determination are all essential, but athletes and coaches are becoming increasingly aware of the crucial role diet plays in sporting success.
The most amazing thing I saw in this most amazing sports year was not especially important or historic or even decisive. No one won a medal at the end of it, no trophy, no championship, no world record. There were no playbooks involved, no chalkboards, no swimsuits, no balls, no bats, no clubs, no rackets. The man who performed the miracle was only doing what every child does, and at the end of it he seemed utterly unimpressed with himself. He would become world famous, but that was later.
Sports Illustrated will announce its choice for Sportsman of the Year on Dec. 2. Here's one of the nominations for that honor by an SI writer. For more essays, click here.
Last week, SI.com caught up with nine-time gold medalist Carl Lewis at the Audi Best Buddies Challenge, a charity bicycle tour and fundraising event to help people with intellectual disabilities. Lewis weighed in on everything from Usain Bolt's record-breaking performance in Beijing to Team USA fumbling the baton in the relays.
Running is a sport where relative success matters. A single group of striving runners can contain an individual for whom running at the pace of the pack is an act of utter laziness, and next to him or her, an individual for whom keeping up with that same pack is a heroic effort.
BEIJING -- That's why they run the races, and throw the disks and jump the bars. So that, with the taste of gold on their tongues, Lolo Jones can heartbreakingly hit the ninth hurdle, and Sanya Richards can tie up with 80 meters to go in the 400. So that Tyson Gay can get knocked out in the semifinals and miss the baton in the 4x100, and so that Stephanie Brown Trafton, who finished third at the U.S. Olympic Trials, can use her first throw to win the first U.S. gold in women's discus in 76 years.
BEIJING -- There will always be another. This is the eternal lesson of track and field. On a sweltering August night 12 years ago, Michael Johnson lashed the 200-meter world record to his back and seemed to drag it deep into the future. He ran 19.32 seconds, so fast that young men accepted that they would not see the record broken again in their lifetimes.
BEIJING -- Bernard Lagat looked like his old self again on Wednesday night. Granted, it was only a semifinal heat of the 5,000 meters, but after failing to qualify earlier in the week for the final of the 1,500, a race he called his priority, Lagat needed a good showing in the 5,000 semis -- maybe to boost his confidence, maybe to regain his form.
Usain Bolt makes the impossible seem commonplace. His running has been so spectacular here that he has forced hard-traveled track scribes to consider the question: Can Bolt break Michael Johnson's 12-year-old record in the 200? The time to beat is 19.32.
BEIJING -- In the belly of the Bird's Nest past midnight, Usain Bolt emerged from a room where drug testing is done, having delivered the samples that might someday say as much about his performance as his winning time. He stepped into a wide hallway where giddy Olympic volunteers beseeched his autograph and his picture. He scribbled again and again, attaching his name to scraps of paper and to shirts, to programs and to credentials hanging from lanyards and surely they would have stayed all night with him.
BEIJING -- Do the eyes lie or do the eyes tell the truth? If they tell the truth, the Olympic 100 meters is over. Break out the gold medal, give it to 21-year-old Jamaican world record holder Usain Bolt and run the race for silver and bronze. Check that; give the silver to his countryman, Asafa Powell and run the race for bronze.
BEIJING -- At 10:13 Monday morning in an Olympic swim stadium called the Water Cube, a world record was broken. Kirsty Coventry, a 24-year-old from Zimbabwe, touched first in a semifinal heat of the 100-meter backstroke, and the towering scoreboard froze numbers and letters next to her name: 58.77 WR. Three people in the audience clapped politely while yawning and checking spectator bus schedules.
BEIJING -- In the last weekend in June, Tyson Gay finally seemed to have found his path to the Olympic Games. Less than a month after he was crushed in the 100 meters by 21-year-old Jamaican Usain Bolt's world record of 9.72 seconds at the Reebok Track Classic in New York, Gay won the U.S. Olympic Trials.
The Beijing games beckoned, far in the distance, as three sprinters aligned themselves last winter for a run at the grandest title in track and field -- Olympic 100-meter champion. They had clearly defined roles: the favorite, the record holder, the upstart.
The U.S. Olympic track and field team was dramatically changed in a period of five seconds early Saturday afternoon during the team trials at Hayward Field.
EUGENE, Ore -- On Saturday morning, no less an authority on track and field than Michael Johnson conceded the future of the 100- and 200-meter races to 21-year-old Jamaican Usain Bolt. There is evidence to support Johnson's theory.
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