In the end this was not about Justin Gatlin. It was not about the drugs and whether a tainted sport would get the totem many feel it deserves. It was about Usain Bolt adding a new veneer of gloss to his legend.
This was far slower than his world record runs but arguably better. Why? He has had only six 100-metre races in the two years before Beijing and has been beset by injuries. He nearly fell over in the semi-final and only just qualified. And for once he had a true rival, a two-time drug offender who had run the four fastest times in the world this year.
However, to say Bolt has saved his sport is to belittle the scale of the scandals overshadowing these world championships. The suspicious blood samples, the whistle-blowers claiming 99 per cent of Russians are on drugs and the string of 2012 Olympic champions stripped of medals remain.
So do Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Asafa Powell and Mike Rodgers — four men in yesterday’s final with doping bans.
Remove Bolt from the 100-metre record books and the fastest 20 times in history have still been set by men who have served doping bans.
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This is now the black and blue riband event and it is impossible to enjoy without suspending both disbelief and cynicism.
Bolt’s gift is he can make you do that. He burst into the global consciousness by showboating in the 2008 Olympic final. The times in Berlin in 2009 may never be beaten. Now he has shown he can fight for every inch rather than being a flat-track bully.
However, even those close to him suspect that he is not the force of old. The main athletics insiders had expected to take over from him was Yohan Blake. In Richard Moore’s excellent new book, The Bolt Supremacy, Bolt’s coach Glen Mills predicts, on the eve of the 2012 Olympic final, that Blake will win in Rio in 2016. “No 30-year-old is going to beat Blake,” he says.
Blake has since suffered a litany of injuries and did not even make the plane to Beijing, but Mills’s comment showed what the cognoscenti felt about Bolt’s longevity. Happily, he is good enough to be the best even if he is past his best.
Gatlin will get another chance next year, but never a better one. Some believe Gatlin is singled out unfairly, but he has served two drug sanctions, which would normally get you a life ban; he served only four years. He wore a wire and put himself at risk to give information to the authorities, but he has offended more than most.
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He has not said sorry either. You cannot have a redemption story without an apology, but an arbitration panel did accept that he had no intent to cheat when he was first banned, blaming the positive test on medication for Attention Deficit Disorder. And, although he could not prove that a rogue trainer had sabotaged him regarding his second failed test, what if he is telling the truth?
Whatever the truth, the number of unresolved scandals in athletics means many will now question Bolt without even a scintilla of evidence. And that is the terrible sin of the dopers.