He can run 100m in 9.58 seconds, but says he’s lazy. He’s the best sprinter on the planet, but fancies turning his hand to professional football. And as for settling down? Forget that.

Usain Bolt is a freak of nature. There’s the size, for starters: 6ft 5in with size 13 feet (ideal sprinters are thought to be between 5ft 11in and 6ft 1in). Then there’s the condition that should have ruled out a career in sport – scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, which resulted in one leg being half an inch shorter than the other. And the attitude – at warm-up, a do-or-die intensity is etched on the faces of his rivals, but Bolt smiles, hangs out, even dances. And, of course, the records: Bolt is the fastest man ever – at both 100m and 200m. Finally, and most outrageously, he wasn’t even giving his all when he broke them.

Bolt has just flown in from Germany and is curled up in his chair like a sleepy cat. His voice is deep, soft and slow. He recently lost his first 100m race in more than two years, to Tyson Gay, and it has been splashed across newspapers that he is injured and will miss the rest of the season. But he’s already focused on the two biggies – next season’s world championships and, most important, the 2012 Olympics in London.

The world has been blessed with phenomenal sprinters, but nobody can hold a light to Bolt. In 2002 he became the youngest gold medallist at the junior world championships, winning the 200m. He was only 15, beating boys four years older than him. To put it in context, if Bolt didn’t exist, his two major rivals, Gay and Asafa Powell, would be battling it out to be the fastest men in history. As it is, they barely figure in the conversation.

Bolt, 24, grew up in a small rural town in Trelawny, Jamaica. When he was a young boy, his parents, who ran the local grocery store, took him to the doctor because he couldn’t stay still. “I was all over the place, climbing things. My mum goes, ‘There must be something wrong with this kid’, and the doctor goes, ‘Nooooo, he’s just hyperactive.’ ” His mother, a Seventh Day Adventist, was gentle and forgiving, his father a disciplinarian who had two other children with different women. Respect was an important word in the Bolt household. And when young Usain didn’t show enough of it, he knew his father would beat some into him. He says he could always tell when he was for it, because his dad became quiet. ”I’ll do something and he’ll talk and talk, but when he’s going to beat you, he just says, ‘Come here’, he holds your hand and then he goes off.”

Look, Bolt says, he doesn’t want to give the wrong impression – his dad may have been tough, but both parents were loving in their own way, and shaped his values. “Manners is the key thing. Say, for instance, when you’re growing up, you’re walking down the street, you’ve got to tell everybody good morning. Everybody. You can’t pass one person.” When he talks about his childhood, he does so in the present tense. It’s a reminder of how young he still is.

Cricket was his first love. He grew up when the West Indies were still a force, and he wanted to be the new Courtney Walsh or Curtly Ambrose. He was gifted, too, opening the batting and bowling for his local side. “But I just happened to run fast. They said, try track and field, and I continued because it was easy and I was winning.”

By the first year of high school, he was already absurdly fast. His dad told him to give up the cricket and concentrate on track and field. “He said I should do running because it’s an individual sport, and if you do good, you do good for yourself.” He cracks his fingers – they’re the longest I’ve ever seen.

Back then, he hated his name. Everybody got it wrong – Husain, Tusain, they’d call him, anything but Usain. But friends and family just called him VJ. That was the way it was in Jamaica, he says – you got a nickname and it stuck. Why VJ? “My mum just said, he needs a nickname, so let’s call him VJ… That’s a boring story, innit?” His laugh is loud, guttural and full of fun.

In Bolt’s likable autobiography, his brother Sadeeki is quoted as saying he was the better cricketer. Is that true? “That’s what he thinks,” Bolt says. And is he a good runner? “Ah, don’t even go there. My brother is really, really slow.” Sadeeki, eight months younger than Usain, also claims that he is the cool one, the handsome one, more popular with the girls. “Oh my God! He’s always saying that. But he’s more laid-back. In that sense, he’s cooler.”

More laid-back than Bolt? Surely that’s impossible. “Yeah, he doesn’t get stressed. There are things that bother me. I try not to let them, but they do.” For example, he says, he was so uptight before that junior world championships final that he put his shoes on the wrong feet. “I’ve never been so nervous in my whole life. I was shaking because everybody was expecting me to win or get a medal. That one moment changed my whole life, because after that I was like, why should I worry?”

He still thinks it’s the greatest race of his life. “I saluted the crowd, they were screaming. I was 15, in front of my home crowd – no better feeling. Gold, record, make your country really proud.”

But for much of the next three years he was injured. That’s when Jamaica turned on him. His own people said he was undisciplined, he partied too much, he was a good-time boy. And, yes, he did like to party, but the truth was he was suffering with the scoliosis. Jamaicans, he says, are always quick to criticise. Even now. He talks about losing to Gay. “I lost one race and it’s this big thing. I went to a party and I met this girl I know, we’re good friends. I got pictured with her, and I got injured, and all of a sudden it’s the girl’s fault. ‘Oh Usain, he’s this, he’s that.’ It doesn’t bother me, because I know that’s how they are.”

He stops and looks at me. “But they’re not as bad as you. You guys are awful, man.” The press? “Yeah, you guys are rough on everybody. You put people under so much pressure.” Take the England football team, he says. “You guys set them up by saying they’ve got to get married early. That’s the English way. But you’re not ready to settle down, and that’s where all the girlfriends come in, and all the problems. You do not want to get married at 22! Especially if you’re famous, because girls are going to be throwing themselves at you.”

He says there’s an inevitability to the way our footballers are undone – marry young, have affairs, get exposed by the tabloids, and that’s when the real problems begin. “I wouldn’t get married now. It would be awful. Wayne Rooney’s the same age as me – he’s married and got a kid. I don’t think these guys are ready to get married yet. There’s less stress on me. If they say, ’I saw Usain out with a girl last night’, whatever, cos I’m not married.”

I’ve never met a sportsman quite like Bolt. While so many are a frustrating mix of buttoned-up, conservative and grand, he is opinionated, funny and grounded. He’s not quite finished with the rights and wrongs of partying. “With me, people say he’s always partying – well, I do party. I work hard, and I do good, and I’m going to enjoy myself. I’m not going to let you restrict me. That’s when the stress comes in, that’s when you start to lose it.”

When he parties these days, he says, he enjoys “a couple” of Guinnesses. And in the old days? “Ah, I don’t want to talk about the old days! I was really bad, because I wasn’t really focused yet. I’d go all night. But I never got drunk. I don’t do drunk.”

Not surprisingly, people have questioned whether somebody can run so fast without taking drugs. “There was one interview, and this guy was saying, ‘You’ve just come on the scene and now you’re running world records, why should we believe you?’ And I was like, first, go check your history. I was world junior champion when I was 15. I got injured, and that delayed me, but you can’t come here saying I just popped up.”

Was he angry? “I was annoyed, because he was really saying he didn’t believe me. I understand why people ask, and I say it’s fine to ask the question, because sportsmen have been through so much.”

The thing is, he says, he’s probably the most tested athlete in the world, so he has nothing to worry about. When he was growing up in Jamaica, all his track friends were clean, too, he says. But they must have been aware of all the drug scandals? “Of course. It was really bad with sprinters – they’d break the record, and a year down the line you’d hear they were on drugs.” In 2007, Marion Jones admitted she had taken steroids just before the 2000 Olympics, was stripped of the five Olympic medals she won and was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison for perjury. For Bolt, the discovery was heartbreaking: “Everybody had loved her and looked up to her, especially the female athletes. Then to discover their idol was on drugs all those years kind of messes you up.”

Bolt couldn’t have arrived at a better time – just when athletics looked as if it had fallen into permanent disrepute, here was a man who looked and acted so differently from those who had gone before. But he still managed to bring his own unique brand of controversy with him. In 2008, he had to plead with his coach to let him run the 100m in Beijing. He had been running the distance for less than a year, and was surviving on a diet of chicken nuggets at the Olympics. Not only did he win gold, he broke the 100m world record with a time of 9.69 seconds and, most astonishing, started beating his chest in celebration 15m before the finish. He was accused of showboating, of not trying hard enough. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said, “I think he should have more respect for his opponents.”

How did he feel about the criticism? “It caught me off guard. I was worried that I really overdid it. But then I went to a couple of the other guys and said, ‘Did you feel I disrespected you?’ And they said, ‘No, if we’d won we’d have probably done the same thing.’ I was just happy. That was all the joy coming up.”

In the build-up to his “proper” event, the 200m, he played around with his hair, demonstrated his new signature pose (based on a Jamaican dance rather than, as often assumed, a lightning bolt) and set a new world record of 19.30 seconds. He followed that with a third gold, in Jamaica’s 4 x 100m relay team. A year later, at the world championships in Berlin, he smashed his own world records to win golds at 100m in 9.58 seconds and 200m in 19.19. Again, it looked as if he could have gone faster.

His team say, without a hint of a smile, that once he knuckles down he can break 9.4 seconds. Bolt himself says he can run faster. So does that mean he’s lazy? “Yeah,” he says enthusiastically. “Yeah, I am lazy. There’s no doubt about that.”

Ricky Simms, his manager, is sitting in with us. Does he agree with that assessment? “Yes, he is lazy. But when he trains, he trains very hard. The image on the track is that he just turns up and runs, but it isn’t true. If you play football with him, he wants to beat everybody. He’s very competitive.”

The thing is, Bolt says, being laid-back ultimately helps him run faster. “On the track, that is just my personality coming out, me having fun. But it also helps me to relax. Back in the day, these guys were so tense, and then you make mistakes. So I have to let everything flow – that’s my way.”

Tyson Gay, on the other hand, looks as if he could explode with tension when he prepares. “That’s just who Tyson is… I don’t think Tyson goes out. He’s a real shy person, just loves track and field, does everything right. We don’t talk that much, because he doesn’t really socialise. I’ve never seen him at a party.”

Did it bother him when Gay beat him? “No,” he says convincingly. But there seems to be a tension between the two of them, I say. He nods. “Of course. When Tyson was beating me early on, we were friends, and then, when I started beating him, everything went the opposite way. He didn’t talk to me that much. I guess he’s just one of those athletes who always wants to be winning.”

But what if the situation were reversed and Bolt was regularly losing to Gay? “That would be hard for me. I couldn’t deal with that.” Would he regard it as failure if, say, he won a couple of silver medals in 2012? “Yes, I would, because you set a standard for yourself.” Would he quit? “No, because I’d want to redeem myself.”

We’re talking about sporting legends, and I ask whether Carl Lewis won gold for sprinting at three Olympic games. He laughs. “I don’t know the history of my sport. I’m not like those people who know everything.”

What does he think makes him such a great runner? He looks a little blank. Perhaps the height helps and those huge strides, he suggests. “A lot of tall people don’t have good coordination, but my coach says the one thing he can relax about is that I learn really quickly.”

“Take off your clothes,” Simms says to him, out of the blue. We both look shocked.

“I can’t ask him to do that in an interview,” I say. “It’s not professional.” Bolt just sits there giggling.

“Look at his body,” Simms says with pride. “He’s a specimen. The first time I took him to the track, the stride was like nothing I’d seen before. You know on the Discovery Channel, you see cheetahs, the way their feet move, the way the mechanics of their body work? He’s similar. The mechanics are so perfect, and the strength he can generate from his hips, his hamstrings and his quads, everything is perfect for running.”

We head off to a makeshift studio to get Bolt’s picture taken and this time he does strip down to his undies. Simms is right, he is a specimen – more racehorse than man. What’s it like to run so fast, to race the wind? “You don’t really think during a race,” he says. He clicks his fingers urgently. “It’s just, what do I need to do now? Bang bang. When I get out of the blocks, I need to get this first turning, bang bang. There’s no time to think. I’m just happy when I’m finished.”

I ask about his ambitions. Ultimately, he says, he’d love to make a go of playing football professionally. He’s being deadly serious. One of the perks of being Usain Bolt is that sporting stars love to meet him, so whenever he’s travelling and there’s time, he tries to train with a top football team. Last year it was Manchester United, a few days ago it was Bayern Munich. He’s still carrying a copy of the French sporting newspaper L’Equipe, which features a spread on his football skills and praise from Bayern manager Louis van Gaal. He shows me a photo of himself with his arm wrapped round the dwarfed 6ft German forward Miroslav Klose. “If I keep myself in shape, I can definitely play football at a high level,” he says.

“With his physical skills, I reckon he could play in the Premier League,” Simms says.

But before that, Bolt says, there is so much more he has to achieve on the track. He can’t wait for the 2012 Olympics; he says it will be like a home gig, because there are so many Jamaicans in London. And if he wins double gold there, then he might be prepared to rest on those considerable laurels. “People always say I’m a legend, but I’m not. Not until I’ve defended my Olympic titles.” He smiles. “That’s when I’ve decided I’ll be a legend.”

• Usain Bolt: 9.58 is published by HarperSport at £20.

Related Posts

• Netball seeks makeover to wow Olympic chiefs
• London Olympics 2012: two years to go
• Why we need Iron Maiden for the Olympics
• Channel 4 to show 2012 Paralympics

Nick Cohen condemns Hamas, but ignores the besetting sins of Israel

While agreeing with Nick Cohen on many issues, I am always baffled by his pro-Israeli stance (“Sympathise with Israel, but not the blockade” Comment). He goes on about Ba’athists or Iran or Islamists, as if their existence justifies any action of Israel’s. He decries Hamas, but Israel caused Hamas’s rise to power by her refusal to reach any compromise with Fatah. Now, Hamas can conveniently be used as an excuse for crimes like Operation Cast Lead, when one of the world’s most heavily populated cities was mercilessly bombed. In his eyes, Muslims/Arabs are to blame for everything and Israel can do no wrong. It’s time to face the truth, Nick: the total oppression of the Palestinians, appropriation of their land, ceaseless building of illegal settle-ments and intimidation or murder of its opponents make Israel a rogue state.

James Dixon

Manchester

Lend an ear to rabbit wisdom

“There is never any way to be sure if your rabbit will be tender,” says Nigel Slater (Magazine). But there is, Nigel, if you start your relationship with your rabbit far enough back. May I quote from the memoir of my 1930s childhood that I am writing for my family? “Rabbits were plentiful in season and boys would sell them at the door for sixpence each. You looked at your rabbit’s ears. If the fur on them was still soft and downy, the rabbit would be tender enough to roast with sage and onion stuffing but, if the fur was bristly, you had best make your rabbit into a pie or stew it with dumplings.”

Betty Birch

London SW6

Play fair with sports figures

It is incorrect to suggest (“Olympic legacy in doubt as sports cash fails to attract women and minorities“, News) that Sport England’s investment has failed to get people playing sport. The number of youngsters taking part has risen substantially since 2005, while adult participation has increased by more than 700,000. With just over two years to go until the Games, we are focused on delivering a lasting, mass-participation sports legacy. This will be the jewel in the crown of this country’s golden decade of sport.

Jennie Price

Chief executive, Sport England

Copy Canada at your peril

Nick Clegg has claimed that his government can learn from the “progressive” experience of Canada, Sweden and the US with budget cutting. (“No return to savage cuts of the Thatcher years“, News). I can assure him, despite my being a long-time member of the Canadian Liberal party, that the Canadian experience is a very bad guide for Britain. In addition to damaging healthcare, the cuts imperilled higher education, increased child poverty, damaged our infrastructure and prolonged higher unemployment.

Harold Chorney, professor of political economy

Concordia University, Montreal

Making sense of Cumbria

There’s been an awful lot of half-baked analysis about Derrick Bird. The articles by Euan Ferguson and Henry Porter (“A tragic old coast that will forever be haunted by the words ‘what if‘”, Focus, and “In the midst of horror, be amazed at the goodness of the survivors“, News) are the reason why the Guardian and the Observer are better equipped to deal with important events than any other news medium; good writers have been allowed space to reflect and have the talent to communicate their thoughts remarkably well. You helped me make some sort of sense of these terrible events.

Chris Lilly

London E14

Hats off to Jessica and Kate

Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson can presumably defend themselves from Barbara Ellen’s attack (“Actresses should stand up against violence in films“), but let me suggest a reason for their appearances in The Killer Inside Me. When you’ve appeared in endless adolescent Hollywood films, any star wanting to demonstrate talent is going to leap at an intelligent film based on a well-regarded writer with a respected director and a fine cast. I am grateful that lending their names to a serious film presumably helped get the project financed and provides a welcome alternative to TV spin-offs and blockbusters.

William Reiss,

London SW19

Don’t swallow pro GM guff

Professor Colin Blakemore claims the Food Standards Agency is not biased in favour of GM food (“GM food deserves better than this witch-hunt“, Comment). Prof Blakemore shows exactly this bias in contrasting the “scientific assessment of the risks and potential benefits of GM” with what he claims are the “unsubstantiated horror stories about GM and uncritical praise for organic farming”. Only one major international scientific assessment of farming systems has been carried out and the conclusions, which supported agri-ecological farming, have been backed by 40 governments, including ours. Prof Blakemore and the FSA are the ones guilty of ideological and unsubstantiated support for GM and unscientific and unjustified opposition to organic farming.

Peter Melchett

Policy director, the Soil Association

Bristol

Related Posts

• Netball seeks makeover to wow Olympic chiefs
• Dave Hill on why there should be no "austerity Olympics" in London 2012
• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• London Olympics 2012: two years to go

Related Posts

• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• Storey included in cycling team
• Football to join World Cup event
• Cyclist Storey aims to double up

Related Posts

• Gay aims for Smith’s 200m record
• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• London Olympics 2012: two years to go
• Israel’s abuse of Palestinians makes it a rogue state | Letters

Related Posts

• Gay aims for Smith’s 200m record
• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• London Olympics 2012: two years to go
• Israel’s abuse of Palestinians makes it a rogue state | Letters

Related Posts

• Clark and Olver facing early test
• Olympic Venues
• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• London 2012 – Santoso reaches second round in Paris

Related Posts

• Clark and Olver facing early test
• Olympic Venues
• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• London 2012 – Santoso reaches second round in Paris

Related Posts

• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• Huegill and Jones to spearhead Aussie assault
• Israel’s abuse of Palestinians makes it a rogue state | Letters
• Pistorius hails record Cup crowd

Anish Kapoor’s Olympic tower will be a draw during the Games. But after that?

The success of Britain’s best-loved piece of modern public art, the Angel of the North, has been a boon to the nation’s sculptors. In every district, especially those scarred by an industrial past, councillors point towards Gateshead and ask: “Can we have one of those?”

Certainly, this question seems to have driven London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics with “something to arouse curiosity and wonder”. Or perhaps he is looking beyond Antony Gormley’s Angel, at the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. The result is the £19m, 115-metre, ArcelorMittal Orbit by Anish Kapoor, “a loop of string arrested in mid-fall”, in the words of our architecture critic Rowan Moore.

So will it achieve Johnson’s dreams? Our willingness to invest in public art is hugely attractive. So is our love for it. The last two decades have seen great improvements to our public spaces and the Olympic Park in Stratford should add further magic. Public art, despite sponsors’ attempts to brand it, can stand as symbol to our beliefs and ambitions.

Of course, not all attempts have had happy endings. While Mark Wallinger’s Ebbsfleet horse is eagerly awaited, Manchester’s B of the Bang, its steel shards falling at disconcertingly inopportune moments, failed.

It is almost impossible to predict what will work, but something that speaks to our shared sense of culture seems a good bet. That the Orbit is part of that great shared endeavour of the Olympics gets it speedily from the starting blocks. It is clearly designed as a spectacle to draw people. It will achieve that, at least during the Games themselves. And after that? Too often, these sites fall into disrepair. Johnson will need to ensure the new park matches his ambitions.

And if not? Well, Kapoor’s Orbit will still be worth a visit, for it will allow us to climb to the top and look away.

Related Posts

• London Olympics 2012: two years to go
• 2012 London Olympics social legacy matters more than sport
• Dave Hill on why there should be no "austerity Olympics" in London 2012
• Cadbury set to reveal 2012 Olympics sponsorship ads

Britain’s record at soundtracking sporting events is woeful. So who better to reclaim some glory in front of a global audience than east London’s heavy-metal overlords?

After tackling such unedifying questions as whether a sausage roll can get more fans than an X Factor judge and if Jon Venables should be executed, Facebook users this week threw their collective weight behind getting Iron Maiden to open the 2012 Olympics. The race is on to amass one million supporters and convince organisers that when the curtain goes up, the assembled ranks of athletes, fans and dignitaries should be deafened by the overlords of British heavy metal.

Britain’s record at soundtracking sporting events is woeful. The 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester ended with – for reasons apparent to absolutely nobody – a Jimmy Cliff and Dave Stewart duet. M People’s Heather Small wandered onstage at one point. And when future historians identify when the western world was left in the dust by China, they will look at the end of the 2008 Olympics, when China’s jaw-dropping, CGI-enhanced performance was followed by the UK. A rickety, balsa wood bus trundled on, then fell apart like a cheap circus prop. Leona Lewis emerged from the roof to sing Whole Lotta Love while Jimmy Page wobbled around on a hydraulic lift, each of them pretending to have a clue who the other was. It couldn’t have been a more poignant metaphor for post-imperial decline if they’d had an old woman dressed as Britannia, ravaged by Alzheimer’s and mumbling her way through TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (“My people humble people who expect/Nothing”).

The 2012 Olympics is Britain’s chance to reclaim some glory in front of a global audience. Iron Maiden have a greater international reach than any other British band, having spent their career touring Japan, the former Eastern Bloc, South America and, more recently, India and the Middle East, selling 75m albums in the process. Their sporting track record is also proven: a career-long devotion to West Ham (check Steve Harris’s claret-and-blue guitar strap and sweatbands); footballing skills displayed in the Holy Smoke video; Bruce Dickinson’s fencing prowess; and their soundtrack to the timeless Daley Thompson Lucozade TV ad. As native east Londoners, they’re also an obvious choice.

Maiden’s thunderous, militaristic bombast is exactly what a spectacle of this kind requires. Without Maiden, it’s JLS pulling their shirts up while Clare Balding dances with Mr Blobby. If Maiden open the Olympics, the whole world will be united under a ragged Union Jack and Britain’s international reputation will be restored. All this while a giant zombie mascot shoots flames out of his eyes and lurches towards a terrified Sebastian Coe, who cries like a girl. Come on, let’s make it happen.

Related Posts

• Usain Bolt: Fast and loose | Athletics | Simon Hattenstone
• Channel 4 to show 2012 Paralympics
• Netball seeks makeover to wow Olympic chiefs
• London Olympics 2012: two years to go