The slogan for these Championships is #BeTheNext. It is not clear whether it is meant to sound inspiring or imploring. In the last decade athletics has become a tent-pole business. Usain Bolt has been holding it up on his own, just as the summer blockbusters prop up the movie studios.
An entire industry has come to depend on him. One has to walk through it to get to the stadium, past the adidas outlet, the booth selling framed slices of the 2012 athletics track, the Asics superstore, the IAAF sponsors’ village with its TDK tent, Seiko store and Toyota showroom. Everyone is selling something, whether it is tickets or T-shirts, and Bolt is the best pitchman they have.
Now Bolt has quit, the sport is desperate to replace him. Everyone is in a rush to coronate the new king. You can see it in the TV coverage, hear it on the radio broadcasts, read it in the papers. “Not in my lifetime can I remember a sportsman or woman, save for Muhammad Ali, who has so grabbed the imagination of the sporting world as Bolt,” Seb Coe recently said. Now, though, enter Wayde van Niekerk, stadium left. “The new superstar of athletics,” the announcer told everyone at the beginning of the evening.
Van Niekerk has been on the international circuit for four years. In 2014 he won the silver at the Commonwealth Games in 44.68sec, in 2015 he won the World Championships in 43.48sec and in 2016 he won the Olympics in a world record 43.03sec. It was one of those precious moments this sport does so well, when an athlete seemed to redefine everyone’s understanding of what the human body is capable. It was a dizzyingly brilliant run, which got a little lost thanks to the IAAF’s clumsy scheduling. They jammed it right up the men’s 100m final.
Which did at least mean that the world got to watch Bolt watching Van Niekerk run on the TV screens by the warm-up track. He was awestruck, open-mouthed like everyone else. There was a neat symmetry with Bolt’s own breakthrough at Beijing in 2008. He took 0.11sec off Michael Johnson’s 200m record. Van Niekerk had cut 0.15 off Johnson’s 400m record. Both Johnson’s marks had felt, and indeed been, well beyond the reach of any of the many other men who had run those distances.
There was already a kinship between the two men. Bolt invited van Niekerk to Jamaica to spend a fortnight training with him earlier that summer, and he has made a point of talking him up ever since. Even he has not been able to resist the comparison. “He’s the one to look out for,” Bolt said just before these Championships. “If he continues like this, he’ll take over track and field.”
The similarities go only so far. Van Niekerk is softly spoken, humble and devout. He has none of Bolt’s swagger or showmanship, he does not beat his breast before he reaches the line or strike lightning poses once he has crossed it. There will not be any stories out about how many chicken nuggets Van Niekerk eats during this championship, or social media posts showing his late night celebrations with the Swedish women’s handball team, or paparazzi shots of him stumbling out of Soho nightclubs at dawn. Van Niekerk actually studied marketing at the University of Free State but he never seems very interested in selling himself. He says he is just‚ “a simple and disciplined guy”,
Van Niekerk certainly does own the 400m. He had the won this final with 50m to go and, like Bolt, wound down well before he crossed the line. Only it was not performance, but strategy. He has to race in the 200m semi-finals on Wednesday, and was in no mood to spend energy he did not need to waste. And since Isaac Makwala missed the race, Van Niekerk knew he had this one won.
After Van Niekerk crossed the line, he bent down to catch his breath, rose, clapped his hands twice, then lay down on the ground while the lactic acid flushed through his system. There was no mad rush of photographers around him, no explosion of camera flashes. Bolt sucks all the oxygen out of a stadium, draws all eyes to him. But before van Niekerk had even got back to his feet, everyone had switched their attention back to the pole vault final taking place at the far end of the stadium.
When that was done the feed on the big screen cut back for Iwan Thomas’ interview with the sport’s new superstar. They chatted while van Niekerk was flat on his back. “It’s a great blessing,” he said. Then he thanked his support team and asked for five more minutes to recover. Athletics does have a new champion, a great athlete and an admirable man, but it does not have a new Bolt.
As Coe said himself, sportsmen like that don’t come along too often. If they really want to stick with that hashtag slogan of their’s, they’ll be waiting a long while yet.
