Six years since his retirement in London, the sizeable figure of Usain Bolt still looms large. No one has lifted the sport of athletics to the extent of the fastest man of all time. And for all the sport’s cumulative efforts since, he has been impossible to replace.
And yet it is the sprinters aiming to emulate Bolt who lead track and field’s fight to stay relevant among a myriad other sports. Netflix cameras will be rolling at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest when they get under way in Budapest on Saturday as part of a series following the fastest men and women of the sport.
Created by Box to Box Films, the production company behind Formula 1’s runaway success series Drive to Survive, the hope is it can take athletics to a new realm of fans as with F1. Six episodes will be released early next year with cameras trained on other aspects of the sport too: namely a documentary on former sprint king Carl Lewis and a two-part NBC series on Noah Lyles.
The American is the closest thing the sport has to a current Bolt: brash, colourful and with a penchant for histrionics both before and after races.
World Athletics president Seb Coe is all too aware of the still sizeable shadow that Bolt casts. “Usain’s Usain,” he said on the eve of these championships. “He had a massive impact on our sport, and he still does, but I’m probably more excited about the generation of athlete coming through across a broader spectrum of events than we’ve ever had.”
To use one of Coe’s favourite words, documentaries are not a panacea for the sport but it does need an injection of interest. British athletics is in need of a lift too. The relatively new hierarchy of the sport’s governing body, UK Athletics, has warned of its perilous financial plight.
UK Sport, which funds Britain’s Olympians and Paralympians through National Lottery funding, stepped in with a £150,000 cash injection for last month’s London Athletes Meet at the former Olympic Stadium in the capital.
There have been rumours of athletics moving away from its London 2012 legacy home to Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium, renovated for last summer’s Commonwealth Games, and London losing its elite athletics foothold.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan recently confirmed plans to renovate the athletics facility at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, where the likes of Bolt used to race pre-London 2012, but there are no definitive plans over how that facelift might look nor a timeline for its completion.
UKA has opted to bring a far smaller team to Budapest than before — 55 athletes rather than the 78 who travelled to Eugene in the United States for the last World Championships, leaving a band of overlooked athletes fuming and threatening legal action. But amid the spats, there is reason for optimism for those back at home watching the BBC coverage.
Britain lays claim to the fastest man on the planet in Zharnel Hughes, a part-time pilot who qualifies for GB by virtue of being born in Anguilla. He is a former training partner of Bolt, who calls Hughes captain, and is coached by Bolt’s former coach, Glenn Mills.
Hughes has broken both British records for the 100 and 200 metres, which had stood for three decades, already this season and has warned he is confident of running faster in Budapest.
Joining him in the starting blocks for the 100 metres is the world’s fastest accountant, Eugene Amo-Dadzie, who confessed this week to only realising how fast he was when running for the bus to work. Fellow sprinter Dina Asher-Smith will again be pushing for medals, while a 21-year-old Keely Hodgkinson has the potential to mark herself as Britain’s next superstar of middle-distance running in Hungary. No one has run quicker than her for 800 metres this year.
Athletics needs a good championships. Eugene last year struggled to resonate on these shores with the unhelpful time difference as the sport desperately tried to find its foothold in the US. Netflix seems a more likely way to cut through now.
Much like with its stance when Russia was found guilty of state-sponsored doping, Coe and World Athletics have been firm over the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Athletes from Russia and Belarus are banned from competing and none will be in Budapest even as neutrals in contrast to the doping fall-out.
The hope is simply for the next nine days that athletics shines a year out from the Paris Olympics
Doping also remains in the background, in particular regarding Kenya, where there has been something of a epidemic, with former Olympic, world and London Marathon champions all caught up in its roll of dishonour.
But it is to the credit of the Athletics Integrity Unit, set up in the wake of the Kremlin-backed doping, that the cheats are being regularly caught.
Inevitably, there will be further failed tests. The hope is simply for the next nine days that athletics shines a year out from the Paris Olympics.
