Opinion
The greatest athlete of the 21st century? Bolt runs away with it
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistESPN recently named its top 100 athletes of the 21st century, mainly to bait hopeless chumps who like to argue over these sorts of things.
And what a crock it is! Numbers 11 to 100 are mostly baseballers, American footballers, ice-hockey players and basketballers (honourable mention: Lauren Jackson, No.84 – the one Australian on the entire list; no Emma McKeon, no Sam Kerr, no Ash Barty). It’s ESPN; it’s for hopeless American mugs.
Let’s get really exercised over the top 10, who are, in the opinion of ESPN: Michael Phelps, Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Tom Brady, Roger Federer, Simone Biles, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt and Kobe Bryant.
To be a world-beater, you ought to beat the world. As the Olympic Games demonstrate each cycle, gold medals follow the money. Advanced countries, with the resources to pour into expensive technology and full-time professionalism for their athletes, celebrate a quadrennial jamboree to reinforce global inequality through ever-more exotic pursuits. As the global north has always known – and as the eastern bloc turned into an industrial mode of production – nothing succeeds like success.
Phelps, who won 23 Olympic gold medals, dominated a minority sport. Forget the technology and professionalism at his service; according to a 2019 Gallup poll, 55 per cent of the world’s population aged over 15 can’t swim. That includes 67 per cent of women. To an even narrower extent, Williams and Federer (tennis), Brady (American football), Biles (gymnastics) and Woods (golf) only had to beat a tiny sliver of the world to be world champions.
Track athletics is the Olympics’ oldest, greatest and only global sport because everyone able-bodied can run. When we want to find the best that all of humanity is capable of, the track is it.
ESPN’s top 10 athletes of the 21st century
- Michael Phelps (swimming)
- Serena Williams (tennis)
- Lionel Messi (soccer)
- LeBron James (basketball)
- Tom Brady (American football)
- Roger Federer (tennis)
- Simone Biles (gymnastics)
- Tiger Woods (golf)
- Usain Bolt (athletics)
- Kobe Bryant (basketball)
I can’t see how Usain Bolt is not No.1 in any survey. Over three Olympiads, he won every event he competed in: the 100m-200m double three times, the 4x100m relay three times, with one taken away because a teammate tested positive for drugs. Bolt also won 11 world championship titles and was beaten into minor medals only at the bookends of his career. His world records in all three of his events still stand. Unlike Phelps, who had many more chances to win Olympic gold medals because swimming has so many more events, Bolt was unbeatable. Not only is Bolt the greatest athlete of this century, he’s the greatest of the previous one, too, and if you disagree it’s probably because you saw him play for the Central Coast Mariners.
The best runners end up capitalising on the best technology, but unlike almost all other Olympic sports, they start at the same point as 8 billion other Earthlings. Bolt came from Jamaica in the developing world, as did his fellow sprinters Elaine Thompson-Herah (the 100m-200m double in Rio and Tokyo) and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (24 Olympic and world championship medals across a 13-year period, nine of them after becoming a mother). The two Jamaican women were racing each other, which limited the number of titles they could win, making them the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic of sprinting.
Speaking of tennis: Williams and Federer, yeah, but no Novak? Who said there was a character test? Who said it was a beauty contest? Djokovic has the superlative record in a sport which is not inaccessible at the grassroots level. If Djokovic hadn’t had his great rivals in his way, he’d have won 50 majors.
If Tom Brady is in the top 10, so are Cameron Smith and Nathan Cleary. Forget it. Richie McCaw and Dan Carter would be better qualified on a global scale as oval-shaped footballers.
Credit: Simon Letch
Round-ball football is a global sport, on the other hand, so no arguments about Messi and maybe Cristiano Ronaldo, Brazil’s Marta, and France’s Kylian Mbappe and Zinedine Zidane are worth discussing.
Basketball is also a world sport, so popular that its players are known by their first names. That said, it’s hard to see how the likes of LeBron and Kobe surpass Mo Farah or David Rudisha (neither of whom made the ESPN 100).
Farah won Olympic and world championship golds over four distances – 5km, 10km, half-marathon and marathon – across an eight-year period. Britain claimed him lovingly when he had been illegally trafficked as a nine-year-old from Djibouti. As an Olympic champion, he was still getting stopped at the US border by customs officers because he was born in Somalia.
Rudisha, from Kenya, was unbeaten over the most punishing distance, the 800m, from 2010 to 2016. He still holds six of the eight fastest times in the event, including the world record. Like Bolt, Rudisha was that once-in-a-generation athlete who was literally unbeatable.
Usain Bolt celebrates as he wins the men’s 200-metre final at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.Credit: AP
Nearly everyone can chuck things, too, and in case you missed it, American Ryan Crouser has just become the first to win three Olympic shot put gold medals. If he was an Aussie, he’d be on your muesli box.
Influence, and a place in the global mind, should also count. Tiger Woods revolutionised his sport culturally and competitively, and the only reason he can be ranked behind Bolt is because golf is not globally accessible and three years of his peak decade were in the 20th century. For all that, I’d still have him in my top 10 because, like Shane Warne, he had a gift for producing miracles under maximum pressure in the most theatrical moments.
On cricketers, only Virat Kohli makes the ESPN top 100, squeaking in at No.97 to pander to an audience that is bigger than baseball’s, American football’s and ice hockey’s put together. I’d still have Warne, Sachin Tendulkar or Muttiah Muralitharan ahead of Kohli because even the second halves of their careers, post-2000, were prodigious.
Why limit the search for the best to just able-bodied athletes or those that compete in one sport? At the time of writing, Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium is trying to become the first athlete to win three straight Olympic golds in heptathlon or decathlon. She has also won two world championships in heptathlon, and is likely the best athlete you’ve never heard of. There’s no doubt that Sarah Storey, of Great Britain, belongs. She won 21 Paralympic gold medals across a 29-year span, 10 in swimming and 12 in track and road cycling. She was also a national champion against able-bodied cyclists.
So, my top 10 athletes of the 21st century in order: Usain Bolt, daylight, Mo Farah, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Lionel Messi, Michael Phelps, Sarah Storey, Novak Djokovic, Elaine Thompson-Herah, David Rudisha, Tiger Woods. All except Messi have competed in individual sports, so if you want to take issue over footballers and basketballers, I’d just say they fit into a very big too-hard basket. Lauren Jackson would still make my top 100, as would Warne, Kerr and Paralympian Matthew Cowdrey. And Dustin Martin. And Daly Cherry-Evans. And Ellyse Perry and Adam Gilchrist ... ahfuggedabout it, chump, when you get started on these things you end up sounding like an American.
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