Tracking Usain Bolt has been a joy... he even played role in my wife giving birth

The search for any frailties in Usain Bolt has proved fruitless for those left trailing in his wake.

Some argue his stumble in the 100metres semi-final at the last World Championships was a rare moment in which he was shown to be a mere mortal on the track.

But the only occasion he has truly looked fallible was the one time he failed to come away with gold from a major championships.

In the final of the 100m of the World Championships in Daegu in 2011, Bolt false started - ironic for an athlete noted for being sluggish off the blocks - and was disqualified.

Gasps resonated around the stadium as the world’s fastest man buried his head into his running vest and swaggered off the track.

His subsequent run in the 200m was enough to send my wife into labour five weeks early with our second son and send me back home early (she baulked at Usain as a name choice).

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I’ve been fortunate not to miss any subsequent births nor, for that matter, Bolt’s subsequent six Olympic and six world golds.

In London on Saturday, Bolt will in all likelihood win his final individual gold in the 100m - he has opted to forego the 200m at his career swan song.

As has been so often the case, no one looks quick enough to beat him even though he is past his best and his rivals know it.

Usain Bolt - In pictures

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Justin Gatlin was the last man to beat him in an individual race over 100m and 200m in Rome in 2013. Gatlin first properly dissected Bolt’s running at the 2008 Olympics.

Banned from competing for doping, his observation was thus: "Already before they took to the line, they had doubts in their minds and that’s because of Bolt."

It has been the same for the American, who was the better athlete going into the last World Championships and has one last chance to better the greatest sprinter of all time.

IAAF president Sebastian Coe has liked to compare Bolt to Muhammad Ali as he did again this week, more to point out to the way in which boxing finally moved on from his retirement as athletics hopes to. And Gatlin also embraces the boxing analogy.

Again, back to that Olympic 100m final in 2008, Gatlin recalls: "I watched him and remembered thinking I wanted an Ali-Frazier rivalry and I wanted to push him to get to the top of the podium."

Bolt ought to deliver that final knock-out punch, but how do you fill the void he will leave behind? The sport is looking to Wayde van Niekerk, a brilliant athlete who could win over every distance from 100m to 400m at future championships but for all his track brilliance, he is no Bolt.

It is 15 years since Ricky Simms first started managing Bolt’s affairs and he is still scratching his head to explain his global appeal. "We were trying to work out why he’s so popular and what he says is just cool and funny," said Simms. "Were I to say the same thing, it just wouldn’t be."

Simms also points out that his athlete is "refreshingly honest". The wider hope has been that such honesty extends to his fairness on the field of play while other rivals have turned to doping. Of the 30 fastest times for the 100m, only nine have been run by an athlete not banned for drugs - all of those nine by Bolt.

He has never dodged the questions about doping in press conferences, the most recent being on Tuesday at a Puma event. At the Commonwealth Games, journalists posted for selfies with him, other press conferences have been peppered with queries about his love life or else his passion for Manchester United, each one answered with good grace.

From a writing perspective, Bolt has been a delight. Any fear of running out of superlatives to describe him blazing a trail for the rest of the world’s fastest men is erased by the fact no one performance from sport’s ultimate showman is the same.

He simply does things differently. Most other athletes would surely have retired after Rio with the latest triple gold, and perhaps Bolt should have done so with his struggles to stay motivated as revealed in the excellent I Am Bolt, which was aired again on the BBC in the build-up to these championships.

The showman was not always thus. At his first Jamaican team appearance in 2003 Bolt was painfully shy. But the on-track persona - at first moulded to build confidence - has taken off.

It is a career that, according to Forbes earlier this year, has earned him £26million, and nearly five million followers on Twitter.

But his laid-back nature both on and off the track disguises his desire to remain the best.

His training partners talk about him turning up at five in the morning to beat the Jamaican heat and pushing himself until he throws up on track. That work rate gives him the pre-race swagger.

Without Bolt, Gatlin may well have had a trophy cabinet full of golds by now, so too other rivals to have come up short against the Jamaican.

"No way, man," is the American’s suggestion to whether he would rather had been running at another time. "Track and field needs its rivalries and Bolt’s mine."

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