Bolt insists: I’m clean
Usain Bolt insists he is “clean” and is happy to fly the flag for athletics after the sport’s recent doping scandal.
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Bolt's compatriot Asafa Powell and US sprinter Tyson Gay both admitted failing drug tests earlier this month.
Speaking ahead of the Anniversary Games at London’s Olympic Stadium this weekend, Bolt admitted the recent revelations have “set us back a bit”.
But he hopes he can “help people forget what has happened”.
Asked if the public could trust him, Bolt rolled his eyes and said: “I was hoping that question would come later in the day.
“How long have you been following me — since 2008 maybe?
“If you were following me since 2002 you would know I’ve been doing phenomenal things since I was 15 and setting records all the time.
“I was made to inspire people and to run. I was given a gift and that’s what I do.
“I’m going to continue running and using my talent and help the sport.
“I’m not going to stress about doping.
“I know I am clean and I just want to improve the sport and that is what I am going to do.”
The six-time Olympic champion says he has not spoken to fellow Jamaican Powell since the failed test was revealed, although he sent him a text message telling him to “stay strong”.
Meanwhile, the London leg of the 2013 IAAF Diamond League series scheduled for today and tomorrow has a new name this year, a new venue, and a new prominent place in Britain’s bright and shiny summer of sport.
For years known as the London Grand Prix and housed at the Crystal Palace stadium in deepest south London, it has been re-branded the Sainsbury’s Anniversary Games, relocated to the east end’s Olympic Stadium, and adopted as the centre piece of the ‘one-year-on from London 2012’ celebrations.
The meeting famously sold out all 120,000 tickets for the two-day athletics programme in 75 minutes and there’s clearly a hunger here to relive the heightened emotions and intense experience of last summer’s extravaganza when Ennis, Bolt, Farah, Rudisha, and many others, briefly displaced football as the focus of pub talk all across the country with 11 London Olympic Games champions and four world record holders in attendance.
Bolt races over 100m at the climax of Friday night’s action against his countryman Nesta Carter, the ever-present Kim Collins, Frenchman Christophe Lemaitre, US pair Michael Rodgers and Charles Silmon, new British whizz-kid James Dasaolu, and UK champion Dwain Chambers.
Bolt will be there for the meeting’s finale too, at the end of Saturday afternoon’s action, when he races in a 4x100m Relay for his Racers Track Club team from Jamaica, against two British quartets and others from Europe, Canada and Australia.
There will also be a 3000m featuring Mo Farah against Ethiopia’s Tariku Bekele, USA’s Dathan Ritzenhein and Kenyans Gideon Gathimba and Ismael Kombich, the timing of which rather suggests Farah and Bolt are likely to revisit their celebration-swapping antics from the concluding moments of the London 2012 track programme.
Source: The Sun/IAAF
