Usain’s Lightning Bolt Strikes Again! By Cameron Duodu

What adjective is now left, with which to describe Usain Bolt?

The guy is “phenomenal”? Yes, but if you put “phenomenal” and “Bolt” together in the Google search engine, it will return no less than five hundred and eleven entries!

Bolt's speed is “fantastic”? You won't believe this: it returns 3,340,000 entries. (All right, there are also some commercial products called “Bolt” which are commonly advertised as “fantastic”, so that doesn't count.)

But whatever way you put it, Usain Bolt's showing at the World Championships in Berlin on Sunday 16 August 2009, will go down as one of the most marvellous sporting moments of all time. You don't clip off 0.11 seconds from a 100 metres record that was itself unbelievable when it was first set, just like that.

But no-one told Usain Bolt. So he ran 9.58 secs in Berlin, shattering the 9.69 secs record with which he astounded the world at the Olympics in Beijing on 16 August 2008 -- exactly one year to the day.

I think I am going to change professions, in my old age, and become a prophet (and thereby presumably transform my financial status overnight, as many have done before me in Ghana and -- especially -- Nigeria.)

For do you know what I wrote in this paper (The Ghanaian Times) when Usain Bolt ran his 9.69 race at the Beijing Olympics? It was this:

“Everyone who saw the 100 metres final in Beijing agrees that Usain Bolt would have run the first ever sub-9.60 seconds race in history -- something between 9.58 (

sic) and 9.55 -- if he had continued running and not "closed down" (the words of Michael Johnson) after 70 metres.

“So why didn't Bolt keep running but began to dance reggae on the track (so to speak) before reaching the tape?

“Bolt's answer is that he was more interested in winning the race than in setting a world record. "My aim was to be the Olympic champion and I did just that, so I'm happy with myself," he said. . . .

“Guess what --I think I know the answer to the 'showboating' that made Bolt's achievement a lesser one than could have been possible. Instead of the carefree, easygoing under-achiever type of personality that he presents to the world, perhaps he has a cunning, business-like brain in that skull of his.

“If he had run his very best, that would have produced a record that would have been more difficult to break in future. And yet, he stands to gain about $1 million each time he breaks the record in future races. That being the case, why not break the record in stages, say, at Grand Prix after Grand Prix, becoming richer by a million bucks on each occasion, rather than astounding the world with a phenomenal record, only to be unable to break it ever again?”

Oyiwa!
If you hear of anyone who is prepared to finance the career of a prophet direct him or her my way. We can do good business together, I reckon.

Meanwhile, I shall foolishly trust my luck and predict again that Usain Bolt will, if he manages to escape injuring himself, take the record into the 9.40's. Do you know why I am saying that? Look, the guy is only 222 (at the time if writing). And he was again looking at the clock in the last few seconds before breasting the electronic “tape“! Yes, once again, he demonstrated that he had reserves of running power in his tank, at the very end of the race.

So just imagine that he gets a trainer who is versed in psychology and who can help Usain to develop what is called “total tunnel vision”, so that he can run an entire 100 metres race without once distracting himself, and finally, also dip at the end of the race, even though no-one would be less than 20 yards behind him? I am taking bets right now!

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A change of subject: my grateful thanks go to the Ghana Journalists Association for naming me as one of the recipients of its honorary awards for 2008. The timing is special, for the awards marked the 60th anniversary of the Association.

I wasn't old enough to be a foundation member of the Association, but I became a member shortly after I became editor of Drum magazine -- in 1961 or so -- and was even elected as its Entertainment Secretary for a while. It is boring for us old scribes to keep telling the younger ones that journalists were fun to be with, in times past, but it is a fact and must be so stated.

Our best years started at the Press Club, housed opposite the Ridge Hospital, and somewhat close to the Accra Lunatic Asylum. How it was that none of us ever landed in either place after a night's “soiree” at the Club, only Jah knows. For everyone came there to unwind. Those were days of enormous political tension in our country, and our ability to bury political differences and fraternise with one another -- even developing affections across the political divide -- was a blessing which, I hope, the younger generation can also bestow upon themselves.

Among our lot were chaps who, if you went by what you read in their papers, would give you the impression that they were ascetic die-hard socialists, who didn't know how to laugh.

But they were all great fun. Kofi Batsa, editor of the ideological newspaper, The Spark, for instance, almost always had a beautiful girl sitting with him at the back of the Mercedes Benz car that had been given to him as Secretary-General of the Pan-African Journalists Union. We teased him endlessly about the “bourgeois” lifestyle of a person whose newspaper was named after one founded by Vladimir Ilych Lenin. He could make me laugh and fall to the floor describing how cats make love in the dead of night.

“Have you ever seen cats making love?” he would ask, with a twinkle in those eyes inside his big head. “They are the only animals who copulate like humans,” he would reveal. You listen to them at night and see! Those cries! Aren't they like that a woman makes when you are particularly good? Eh?” Kofi even coined a pidgin French expression to describe sex: formation du cat! He would wink, on getting up from his drink and whisper, “formation du cat”!

Eric Heymann, whose paper The Evening News, gave the impression that it was written for one person to read and that the person was called “His High Dedication”, was also not above being interested in what he called aguavis. Or was it acquavis. He went to India on a freebie and came back with the word, “atchah” as a permanent feature of his speech. Simple and down-to-earth, he was a joy to be with. When political developments at Flagstaff House baffled him, he would mutter, “Comrade, the line is not straight!”

Although the more idiotic ideologues suspected my loyalties as a Pan-Africanist because Drum originated from South Africa (my answer to them was: “if you're fighting and you find an AK-47 on the ground, do you pause to find out where it was made or who dropped it?) Eric never held that against me. I used to go and do proof-reading for him on my days-off, when I was at GBC and he was producing The Evening News almost single-handed. It was working with him at the “stone” that prepared me for the burdens that I was to endure, years later, at the Daily Graphic. I understood what an “empty chase” was all about from Day One, and how complex it was to “lift” a page, once it had been “moulded”.

Talking of freebies, I went on one to Rome with T D Baffoe, editor of The Ghanaian Times. I thought his editing style was a bit too aggressive, but he was great fun. It was he who introduced me to the music of Dusty Springfield. I found it instructive that he liked the song that contained pathos, “I just don't know what to do with myself”. Kaiser Aluminium Company astutely took T D Baffoe and other senior journalists on a tour of the USA just when it looked as if relations between the Ghana Government and the US Government were reaching breaking point and might threaten the Volta River Project. T D came back saying things like “When a man gotta go, he gotta go!” and “Between Circle K and Oakland, if they give you hell, you give 'em hell!”. He obviously had tremendous fun in America.

By the time we moved to the premises that later became the Ghana Institute of Journalism, our status as a place to sample opinion had grown enormously. Malcolm X came and talked to us there. Dr Ras Makonnen, who had kept the Pan-African movement alive in London and with the indefatigable George Padmore, organised the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, was also a frequent visitor to us. Kofi Baako behaved with us as if he was a journalist and not a Minister. The writers fraternised with photographers and other members of the profession: I fondly remember Bob Okanta of the Information Services Department. C V M Forde, an erudite scholar of Sierra Leone origin, could bring the house down with his declamations about “Mount Versuvius.” Or was it Olympus.Julius Sagoe who wrote strongly Marxist articles in The Spark ( his real name was Sam Ikoku) was also always there, with Olu Adebanjo and other "Awolowo Boys" in tow. They had all managed to reach Ghana as refugees, having escaped from the arests that led Chief Obafemi Awolowo's treason trial,

We all had a job to do or political careers to oursue, but we didn't allowsuch things to prevent us from enjoying life. The result was that none of us took ourselves too seriously. No-one can ever re-create the atmosphere of those days, for it is in the nature things that change happens. But our youngsters must allow the spirit of the profession to thrive amongst themselves.

They should work hard, play hard, and harbour malice towards none.