Lightning strikes in 9.77

MOSCOW -- A few minutes before the men's 100 meter final here Sunday night, lightning began flashing in the sky over Luzhniki Stadium. Just in time for the Bolt show.

As the rain came down hard and fast, Usain Bolt rocked to victory Sunday night in the men's 100-meter final in a season-best 9.77 seconds.

Lightning flashed, literally, as Bolt crossed the finish line. Some things are just too fantastic for even scriptwriters to dream up. "I need to get that picture right now," Bolt said later. "That is pretty cool."

Track and field is, right now, in many ways, Usain Bolt. It made no difference that his winning time Sunday was not close to his world record of 9.58, not even close. Indeed, it marked only Bolt's sixth-fastest time. His time was, in fact, two-hundredths of a second slower than the fastest mark in the 100 this year, 9.75, run in June by American Tyson Gay, who has since reportedly failed more than one doping test. Gay has acknowledged that he has failed at least one test.

Just imagine if Tyson Gay had won this race. What if his doping matter had come out not before these worlds but -- after? What then for track and field?

American Justin Gatlin, who took second Sunday behind Bolt in 9.85, is the 2004 Olympic 100 champion but then served a four-year doping ban. What if Gatlin had won? What then for track and field?

The sport woke up Sunday to a report that Trinidad and Tobago's Kelly-Ann Baptiste, the  2011 world championship bronze 100 medalist with 2013's third-fastest time in the women's 100, reportedly failed a doping test and had withdrawn from the championships. "Drug Blow," screamed the front page of the Sunday Express, the West Indies' islands main paper.

The list of high-profile sprinters now known or believed to have failed doping tests this year alone: Gay, Baptiste and Jamaicans Asafa Powell, Sherone Simpson and Veronica Campbell-Brown.

Baptiste, as the newspaper noted, trains in Gay's group in Florida. Campbell-Brown and Gay are longtime friends.

Last week, Australian javelin thrower Jarrod Bannister was suspended for 20 months for missing three out-of-competition tests; French hurdler Alice Decaux has been provisionally suspended after testing positive for a supplement.

Forty Turkish track and field athletes have been suspended in recent weeks for doping. Several are just teenagers.

And then there is Bolt -- who has said up and down, this way, that way, every which way that he is clean.

Marion Jones said she was clean, too. So did Lance Armstrong. Everybody says they're clean -- until they're proven not.

“If you’ve been following me since 2002, you would know I’ve been doing phenomenal things since I was 15,” Bolt said last month in London. “I was made to inspire people and made to run. I was given a gift, and that’s what I do.”

Is Bolt the real deal? Is he, finally, the one star the world can believe in?

Or -- like so many other big names who have been unmasked -- too good to be true?

Time ultimately reveals the truth. Always.

Four of the five top finishers in Sunday's men's 100 were Jamaicans: Nesta Carter, who took third behind Bolt and Gatlin in 9.95, as well as Kemar Bailey-Cole and Nickel Ashmeade, both in 9.98.

This from a country that saw its national anti-doping agency perform a total of 179 tests in all of 2012, according to a letter published Aug. 7 in the Jamaica Gleaner. That letter, from the former executive director of the agency, sought to update the figure published in late July in the World Anti-Doping Agency 2012 global statistics database. That 106 figure, R. Anne Shirley said in the letter to the Gleaner, was mistakenly low, due to a reporting error.

All tests carried out by the he Jamaican agency, which goes by the acronym JADCO, were urine tests; JADCO performed not even one blood test, according to the letter.

Arguing that 179 is "somewhat better than what has been previously reported," the letter also said it's still "not as much as the agency or the Government would have/might have wished for …"

At a news conference late Sunday night, Bolt was asked about his connection with the German doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, and whether he -- Bolt -- had ever used Actovegin, an amino acid preparation derived from calves' blood.

Actovegin is not on the WADA banned list.

Even so, WADA "closely monitors" its use. In part, that's because, for instance, Lance Armstrong and his team were regularly administered it on the grounds it was believed Actovegin would enhance a rider's performance, according to the brief against Armstrong filed by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

"I don't know," Bolt said. "I really don't know the name of any substance. We just give that to my team. My team checks out any doubt. They clear it with everybody, make sure it's not on any IAAF, WADA [list] -- they have no problems with it."

So far, Bolt has had no testing problems.

Which leaves us with what we had Sunday in the rain:

Bolt, as ever, got off to a slow start. After the fiasco at the world championships in Daegu two years ago, in which he was disqualified for false-starting, it is his now way to stay in the blocks and make sure he starts safely.

Ashmeade, for instance, got out in 0.142 seconds. Bolt -- and Gatlin, too -- 0.163.

Gatlin went out hard. But anyone who has watched Bolt race since he burst onto the international scene big-time in 2008 knows that the last 50 meters are his for the taking, and that was the case Sunday as well.

Gatin acknowledged "feeling Bolt next to me" at about 45 meters. For his part, Bolt said, "I had to do what I do the last 50."

It was the sixth world title of Bolt's career -- two in the 100 (2013, 2009), two in the 200 (2009, 2011, with the 2013 race yet to come), two in the 4x100 relay (again, this year's relay still to go).

Of course, Bolt is the 2008 and 2012 Olympic champion as well as world record-holder in the 100, 200 and the 4x100 relay.

It is not just that Bolt wins but that he does it with such dominance. Here are the margins of his 100-meter Olympic and world championship victories:

2008 Beijing Olympics: .20.

2009 Berlin worlds: .13.

2012 London Games: .12.

2013 Moscow worlds: .08.

"I'm going to try to continue with these championships," Bolt said. "I want to be among the greats after I retire from track and field.

"Pele, Maradona, Muhammad Ali, all these guys -- I want to be mentioned among these greats."

For all that he has done on the track, Usain Bolt absolutely, unequivocally deserves to be mentioned among the greats. The challenge for Usain Bolt is that he is the best in his sport, and his sport greatly deserves special scrutiny.

"If he tests positive, he tests positive," Lamine Diack, the president of track and field's international governing body, which goes by the acronym IAAF, said recently of Bolt. "It would be a disaster for our sport but we would have to say he is positive.

"But I hope that doesn't happen because we don't need that."

A marathon, or an ordeal?

MOSCOW -- It is said by sport executives at the highest level, almost as if it is a prayer refrain offered in complete sanctification and utter devotion, that athletes are at the heart of everything they do. What to make -- once again -- of the women's marathon at the track and field world championships? The race, the first showcase event of the 2013 championships, started at 2 in the afternoon. The temperature at the start: in the mid-80s. Under an unrelenting sun, with no clouds in a high blue sky, it stayed hot throughout. The humidity: over 60 percent.

Forty-six women finished. Twenty-three did not. That makes for easy math: half as many did not even finish the race as did.

That's not a marathon. That's survival.

Edna Kiplagat of Kenya won the ordeal, in 2:25.44, becoming the first female back-to-back marathon world championship winner. Valeria Straneo of Italy finished second, 14-hundredths back. Japan's Kayoko Fukushi took third, in 2:27.45.

American Deena Kastor, the Athens 2004 Olympic Games bronze medalist, finished ninth Saturday in 2:36.12. Hours after the race, she would post to her Twitter account that it was the "hardest marathon ever," the word "ever" in all capital letters, adding that she couldn't walk on one foot and now had a "blood blister on my lip (of all places) and a horrible sunburn." She added this hashtag: #MyDermoWillHateMe

Why did this race start at such an absurd hour, in such ridiculous conditions? Consider this possibility: 2 in the afternoon in Moscow is 7 in the evening in Tokyo -- prime time Saturday evening viewing. And TV rights fees can be worth a lot of money, it's true.

On the one hand, what race organizers have asked the best female marathoners to run through in recent years at these world championships ought to forever put to rest any argument over whether women are tough enough to handle any and everything. On the other, going forward, organizers need a cold dash of common sense before something dreadful -- like, fatal -- happens.

The 2011 women's world championships marathon in Daegu, South Korea, went off with the temperature at 79 and humidity at 72 percent. At the 2007 race, in Osaka, Japan, the temperature was a searing 90; that race won by Kenya's Catherine Ndereba in 2:30.37, the slowest-ever world championship, hardly a surprise, seven minutes slower than Ndereba ran to win the 2003 marathon.

"I was just trying to endure the race, to get to the finish," Fukushi said after Saturday's third-place effort.

"The time of the race is unusual because I am used to run most of my races in the morning," Kiplagat said.

Chris Turner, a spokesman for track and field's governing body, the IAAF, pointed out that in Daegu and Osaka, some of those who did not finish -- colloquially known as DNFs -- had to be hospitalized because of the brutal conditions. "Here," he pointed out, "none of the DNFs had to be hospitalized."

It should be self-evident that "did not need to be hospitalized" should not be the baseline of running a world-class marathon.

The marathon served as the warm-up -- literally -- to the only final of the night on the Luzhniki Stadium track, Britain's Mo Farah's victory in the men's 10,000, and to Jamaican superstar Usain Bolt's first appearance in the heats of the men's 100 meters.

Bolt eased through in 10.07 seconds, the seventh-fastest time of the day.

"I didn't try to run too fast," he said later. "I was trying to work on my technique to get it right. Tomorrow, I will put more speed into it."

The semifinals and finals of the men's 100 go down Sunday. Bolt will be the huge favorite. Fellow Jamaican Yohan Blake, who won the 100 in 2011 when Bolt false-started, is injured. And American Tyson Gay is out because of a positive doping test.

In the men's 10k, in what proved to be a relatively slow and tactical race, Farah and Ethiopia's Ibrahim Jeilan dueled down the homestretch, just as they did in 2011 in Daegu.

Two years ago, Farah didn't have enough finishing speed. Last year in London, he proved he certainly did, winning not only the 10 but the 5,000 meters as well.

This year, he won by two steps, in 27:21.72. Jeilan crossed in 27:22.23.

Farah said later, "I was thinking on the home straight, 'Not again, not again, not again.' "

The victory now gives Farah the full set -- world and Olympic titles in the 5 and 10k. The only other man to win all four is Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele.

Farah is due to run the 5k next Friday.

Kenya's Paul Tanui finished third. American Galen Rupp, Farah's training partner and the silver medalist in London, placed fourth.

"I just didn't kick," Rupp said. "It's not that complicated."

In the mens' decathlon, Americans finished Day One 1-2.

Ashton Eaton, the London gold medalist, ran the 400 meters in 46.02, the fastest 400 ever at a worlds. That gave him a lead of 4,502 to 4,493 after five events over 20-year-old Gunnar Nixon.

Two-time defending champ Trey Hardee dropped out with a hamstring injury. He failed to clear a height in the high jump.

"I'm out there having fun -- no pressure," Nixon said.

Track's dirty day

When people ask, and they ask all the time, is track and field clean, there's only one answer. It came on a day like Sunday, when sprinter Tyson Gay, once among the poster boys for a U.S. Anti-Doping run-clean program, tested positive for a banned substance, and five Jamaicans, including gold medal-winning sprinters Asafa Powell and Sherone Simpson, also returned positive samples.

Those developments followed by just days word that the sport's governing body, which goes by the acronym IAAF, had stepped up its drug-testing program in Turkey amid reports of dozens of positive cases there, perhaps as many as 30, ahead of last month's Mediterranean Games in the city of Mersin.

Results in Turkey remain ongoing; under IAAF rules, a doping case can be announced only after a "B" sample confirms the initial positive finding of a failed "A" sample. Turkey has been hit by a rash of recent cases -- eight in June, including 2004 Olympic hammer silver medalist Esref Apak, and in May, allegations against London Olympic 1,500 meter champ Asli Cakir Alptekin and two-time European 100-meter hurdles champion Nevin Yanit.

The rash of positives Sunday comes just weeks after 2004 and 2008 200 meter Jamaican Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown tested positive for a banned diuretic. Gay and Campbell-Brown are longtime friends.

Powell and Gay, to be clear, are among track and field's biggest names. For them to be busted, and on the same day, is -- there's no way around this -- a double dose of ugly news for a sport that just can't escape the perception that doping remains the fast lane to victory.

The world championships will be run next month in Moscow. Now they surely will go off under a shadow. A thread on the letsrun.com message boards proclaimed: "Admit it, we are all now waiting to see if [Usain] Bolt is positive … "

Bolt, the multiple Olympic champion, self-proclaimed "legend" and world-record holder in the 100 and 200 meters, has maintained to all skeptics that he is running clean.

As Adam Nelson put it in a Twitter post Sunday, "Drug testing detects the symptoms. We have a lot of work to do to fight the cause."

Nelson would know. He was made the 2004 Olympic shot put champ earlier this year after the guy who for nine years had won, Ukraine's Yuriy Bilonog, was finally caught. Bilonog had been doping.

Gay, 30, has run a 9.69 100 meters, the second-fasted ever -- tied with Yohan Blake, behind Bolt's 9.58.

A three-time world champion in 2007, Gay had often been plagued since by hamstring and groin problems. He came in fourth in the 100 at the London Games by one-hundredth of a second. This year, he had run the world's fastest 100, 9.75 in Des Moines at the U.S. nationals in June.

A few years ago, he was part of USADA's "My Victory" program, in which athletes pledged to complete clean. In his testimonial on that website, Gay said, "I compete clean because I really believe in fairness, and besides that, my mom would kill me! Just being honest."

He told Associated Press on Sunday that he had been notified late last week that a sample came back positive from a May 16 out-of-competition test, adding that he will have the "B" sample tested soon, possibly as early as this week. He said he had voluntarily withdrawn himself from Moscow.

It remained immediately unclear what Gay had tested positive for.

"I don't have a sabotage story," he said. "I don't have any lies. I don't have anything to say to make this seem like it was a mistake or it was on USADA's hands, someone playing games. I don't have any of those stories. I basically put my trust in someone and was let down."

Asked by AP who that was, Gay said, "I can't really say it. Sometimes a human being naturally, generally trusts somebody. That's what people do."

USA Track & Field chief executive Max Siegel said in a statement, "It is not the news anyone wanted to hear, at any time, about any athlete."

Powell, for his part, held the world record -- running a 9.74 in 2007 -- before Bolt started his assault on the mark. Powell is still the fourth-fastest man all time and holds a gold medal as part of the Jamaican 4x100 2008 relay team.

Powell has run 9.88 this year. Even so, he did not make the Jamaican team for Moscow.

He and Simpson reportedly tested positive for the stimulant oxilofrine, and Powell issued a statement in which he denied being a "cheat."

It said, "I want to be clear in saying to my family, friends and, most of all, my fans worldwide that I have never knowingly or willfully taken any supplements or substances that break any rules."