Usain Bolt’s retirement brought urgent questions about his future and that of athletics. The noise around him has faded now, replaced by a quiet resignation. Last Sunday, the night of the Olympic men’s 100m final he won three times, he was posting promotional material for Corona (beer, not virus). By the evening of the 200m semis it was ads for Puma.
Seemingly estranged from the sport he elevated, there has been no sight of Bolt yet at these Olympics. Barring a Celine Dion-style reappearance in the closing ceremony, it seems unlikely he will materialise. So where is Bolt? Likely in Jamaica, although his representatives did not respond to a query about his whereabouts.
There were rumours he would play some part in an opening ceremony which found roles for less decorated Olympians including Zinedine Zidane and Serena Williams. Bolt did not appear and seven years after his final race, the 4x100m World Championships relay ruined by a torn hamstring in London, his absence is striking.
The IOC has little difficulty attracting other icons of the Games into its ‘Olympic family’ and it is not as if Bolt has gone into hiding. He produced a reggae album, ‘Country Yutes’ with his manager and best friend Nugent ‘NJ’ Walker in 2021. His Usain Bolt Foundation works to improve education and opportunities for Jamaican children.
Last year it was reported that around £10m of his money was missing from an account with a private investment firm in Jamaica. “I’m not broke, but it has definitely put a damper on me,” he told theJamaica Observer. He played in a charity football match in January but was stretchered off after injuring his Achilles. But compared to his former ubiquity it is a life on the fringes these days.
The withdrawal from athletics is what was feared when he retired. “We have to make sure we persuade him to devote some time to athletics in more than just an ambassadorial role,” wrote World Athletics president Sebastian Coe in theTelegraph eight years ago.
Initially Bolt seemed keen to prolong his involvement in sport, so long as it was not athletics. His aim to play football professionally took him as far as a trial with Australia’s Central Coast Mariners, he owns a stake in an Irish eSports group and this year he was an ambassador for the Men’s T20 World Cup in the USA.
From Bolt’s perspective the willingness to re-engage is there, but an agreement with World Athletics is yet to emerge. “I’m still waiting on a position from [World Athletics],” he said last year. “I’ve reached out to them and let them know I would love to make a bigger impact in sports, as long as they want me to. We’ve been in talks but we’ll have to wait and see what comes around.”
What is there to unpick beyond that? Maybe he has priced himself out of anything other than commercial work? Maybe maximising time with your family is actually quite important? Maybe retiring from sport actually means something?
Some reticence to re-enter can be expected. Bolt has scoliosis, an irregular curving of the spine and a left leg slightly longer than the right. He suffered an unusually high number of injuries. “I won the World Junior Championships in Kingston when I was 15 and from there there was a lot of expectation placed on me,” he said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper AS this week. “The toughest years came after, constantly getting injured.”
When Bolt retired it was treated like an extinction-level event for his sport, as if nobody could fill his void. Yet the exit of any world-famous superstar generally feels like this. The doomsayers always underestimate how young people find new heroes.
Those reared on Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe could not conceptualise Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. When they retired there was talk of tennis in crisis during the Lleyton Hewitt fallow years, before Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer came along. With Federer and Andy Murray gone, and Novak Djokovic now 37, that hand-wringing cycle begins again.
But all sports renew and we have seen several signs of that already at the Stade de France during this Olympics athletics programme. Femke Bol appearing to move with less urgency than her competitors yet overtaking them all anyway, Mondo Duplantis breaking the pole vault world record at will, the steely certainty of Keely Hodgkinson.
And, perhaps most importantly, an attention-grabbing force winning the men’s 100m. Noah Lyles does not have Bolt’s unforced charisma. His self-described “main character energy” comes off as altogether more confected. But he is magnetic all the same, perhaps more of an antagonist than the protagonist Bolt was.
Maybe such unfettered self-promotion chimes with a younger audience and maybe that is what athletics needs. All being well, when Bolt chooses to lend his brilliance to his sport again it will no longer need him as it once did.
