Tyson Gay - Photo coolgates CCANC
Tyson Gay is busy running times that would be earth-shattering were it not for the existence of Usain Bolt. A 9.77 second effort in the 100m is the fastest time in the world this year, while his 19.58 200m time is the third best of all time. He’s a serious contender for the big prizes in Berlin as long as he is not cowed by the presence of Bolt. However, having looked at the hyperbole which surrounds the Jamaican, we were curious to see the following sentence uttered by Gay in an interview in the Sunday Times:
“He’s a beast, a monster, a freak,” Gay says of Bolt. “He’s doing something no-one’s ever heard of. He’s in a class of his own, like LeBron James or David Beckham. It’s hard to study people like that.”
We’re not hugely knowledgable about basketball, but the impression is certainly that James is a bit of a sensation and one of the luminaries of the sport. Beckham, on the other hand? Well, he’s quite a big name in America, even if many of his club’s fans seem to hate him - but he’s barely on the periphery of the England team, let alone in a class of his own.
One can’t blame him for not knowing about a sport, but it’s a bit of a silly cross-sport comparison to make if you don’t know much about football.
Still, chat between these two is going to draw attention in the press, especially as the World Championships near. As they won’t have raced one another before Berlin, it will be mouth-watering when the pair finally compete against one another rather than the stopwatch - but in the interim, you can trust publications like the Mirror to give you the (misrepresented lowdown):
Tyson Gay vows to tame Usain Bolt in Crystal Palace clash
And from the article itself:
Gay will run the 200m at Crystal Palace. Bolt competes in the 100m and 4 x 100m relay.
Going to be hard to tame him when you’re not racing him directly. Then again, he didn’t vow to tame him in the first place - here are the quotes from the article:
“I give respect where respect is due. Usain Bolt deserves respect.
“What he does on the track is stuff other people can’t do.
“That motivates me to train harder and reach goals that no one else has reached before.”
Respect for a man who does things other people cannot do has been square-pegged into the round hole of vowing to tame. It’s beautiful to see.
