Decade of Highs and Lows

Marion Jones

So we have come to the end of the eventful year and everyone is discussing the biggest, best and worst sports events of the year. What sports story do you think was the biggest or that stood out the most to you?

The decade of some sports highs and lows:

Usain Bolt set another world record in the 200 final, this time bettering Michael Johnson’s 1996 mark which statisticians had predicted would last for 25 years, and added a third when the Jamaicans won the 4×100 relay.

Usain Bolt

This year Bolt went under 9,6 for the 100 and again broke the 200 mark at the Berlin world championships.

Bolt on the track, Michael Phelps in the pool and Yelena Isinbayeva through the air showed that the most elemental Olympic sports can be the most satisfying. Phelps won a record eight gold medals in nine days in Beijing with seven world records while Isinbayeva raised her own women’s pole vault record to 5,05 metres, her 24th world mark.

Michael Phelps

Awe at Bolt’s extraordinary feats near the end of the decade followed widespread unease prompted by events at the start.

In 2000 Marion Jones was the athlete of the moment after announcing she would go one better than Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis and win five track and field Olympic golds. Jones, who had featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Vogue while securing multi-million dollar contacts, spent the Beijing Games in jail after admitting to systematic drug use before Sydney.

Drugs scandals have besmirched the Tour de France and eroded the credibility of athletics and weightlifting.

This year Formula One team Renault admitted Nelson Piquet had deliberately crashed at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help team mate Fernando Alonso win the race.

Jones was exposed as a result of the BALCO scandal in which federal investigators discovered she had been one of the clients of a laboratory dedicated to manufacturing performance-enhancing drugs designed to fool the testers.

Despite its travails, sport not only survives but prospers in the rapidly shrinking global village and looks set to thrive further despite the financial crisis which hit the world shortly after the Beijing Games.

The world governing body FIFA is expected to amass $2,5 billion in television revenue from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa despite the economic crisis.

Sports are spreading outside their traditional markets, with the 2009 European golf tour, for example, starting in Shanghai and climaxing in Dubai.

The 2007 Tour de France started in London, two years after Lance Armstrong won a record seventh consecutive title.

Armstrong, who had fought a successful battle against cancer which had invaded his lungs and brain, retired in 2005 but came back in 2009 to finish a creditable third.

In September 2009 Forbes magazine announced that Tiger Woods, who has succeeded Michael Jordan as the world’s best-known athlete, had become the first sporting billionaire.

Woods has become an athletic and commercial phenomenon since winning the US Masters in 1997 by 12 strokes. In the process he achieved the improbable feat of making golf, sport of the suburban middle classes and the country clubs, appear glamorous.

However, Woods’s lifetime ambition to overhaul Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors was put on hold in the final month of the decade when he admitted to cheating on his wife and announced he was taking an indefinite break from the game.

One of the joys of sport is its unpredictability. The Woods case, which shows that athletes however gifted possess the same human frailties as the spectators, is all part of the appeal.

HAVE YOUR SAY: What sports story do you think was the biggest or that stood out the most to you?