It took 9.69 seconds, on 16 August, 2008, for Usain Bolt to blitz his way into the record books. (Some say he’d have run 9.55 seconds had he not celebrated, but that was Number 4 on our list!) Only four days later, on 20 August, he covered 200m in 19.30 seconds, to solidify what was fast […]
Archives for 2008
Top 8 of ’08: Number 2
Our number 2 story of 2008 is also our most controversial, at least personally. The discussion around Usain Bolt generated some heated emails, but they were fan mail compared to some of the comments and emails received in response to my position on Oscar Pistorius, South Africa’s Paralympic sprint challenge, who hit the big-time in […]
Top 8 of ’08: Number 3
The Number 3 Sports Science story of 2008 comes from the swimming pools of the world. It is a story we’ve featured heavily this year, perhaps more than any other (so it may even have been deserving of the Number 1 slot), because of the scientific, philosophical and ethical questions it has thrown up. It […]
Top 8 of ’08: Number 4
Michael Phelps has scooped up most of the awards for Athlete of 2008, for his incredible haul of eight golds (7 with world records, though as we’ll see, swimming world records mean very little) in Beijing. But our athlete of the year is not Phelps, but Usain Bolt of Jamaica. The greatest sprinting Olympic Games in […]
Top 8 of ’08: Number 5
There was a time, perhaps 20 years ago, where a positive drug test meant a positive drug test. One of my earliest memories of sport, and specifically of the Olympic Games, was watching the sports news in 1988, and seeing Ben Johnson being hustled out of a press conference in Seoul after returning a positive […]
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