Usain Bolt vs Muhammad Ali: How does Jamaican sprint king compare with the greatest ever sportsman?
SunSport's Shaun Custis and Bill Leckie go head-to-head to decide one of sport's biggest questions
USAIN BOLT and Muhammad Ali are two of the great athletes ever.
But who is the actual greatest? Shaun Custis thinks Bolt, while Bill Leckie argues for Ali:
USAIN BOLT has no need to throw himself at the line to get this verdict.
Since 2008, when Bolt set three world records in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay at the Olympics in Beijing, he has been not just the king of sprinting, but the king of athletics.
Astonishingly a year later he set new marks at the World Championships of 9.58sec over 100m and 19.19 over 200m, which still stand today.
No one gets near him on or off the track.
When I first met The Greatest — and I mean Bolt not Muhammad Ali — to ghost-write his book ‘9.58 Being the World’s Fastest Man’, he laid out in the starkest terms the statistic that sets him apart.
Bolt explained: “The population of the earth is 6.8 billion, and approximately 107 billion have lived on this planet since man came into being. It doesn’t get any cooler than knowing you are the fastest of them all.”
You see you can measure a sprinter to an infinitesimal degree and it is what attracted Usain to running in the first place.
He has always loved cricket and football but, as a schoolboy, he worried that performances in those two sports could be objective and at the whim of the team coach, who might choose not to pick you.
In sprinting there is no argument, if you are the fastest, you are in. No coach or manager can drop you.
Boxing is subjective too. Judges can decide the outcome, while pundits and experts will argue about who was the best.
Many will say Ali, but that will not be universal. There will be arguments for Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis and Floyd Mayweather among others.
Ali lost five fights in his career, and even if we accept that we should be comparing sportsmen at their peak, he still lost two at his best to Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, although in fairness he avenged both twice.
But Bolt has only lost one major individual race in the last eight years, the 2011 World Championships 100 metres in South Korea.
And he didn’t really lose it, he false-started and never got the chance to run. We all know Bolt would have won.
His fellow Jamaican Yohan Blake, who won that day, has been pounded into submission by Bolt ever since.
Blake was fourth in the race in Rio and was barely in the picture as Usain crossed the winning line
When we look at football and Pele, who Bolt also ranks among the greats, the Brazilian was indisputably a genius. But since then there has been Diego Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. All could lay claim to being the greatest the game has ever seen.
But who is the greatest sprinter? It’s a unanimous, 100 per cent agreement, it’s Usain Bolt. Case closed.
ONE was an icon. The other is a brand.
A distinction without a difference, some might argue. But for me, in the heavyweight contest to end them all, it’s what separates two towering figures on points.
Ladies and gentleman . . . still The Greatest and always will be . . . Muhammad Ali.
For while Usain Bolt is an insanely good athlete, while there’s an argument that he IS modern-day athletics and while he has the looks, the charisma and the self- confidence which transcend physical ability into global celebrity, he simply has to take it on the chin and accept he will never be right up there.
In fact, push to shove, I’m not even sure he’s as great an Olympian as 23-time gold medallist swimmer Michael Phelps — though that’s a debate for another day.
Bolt says he wants to be talked of in the same breath as Ali.
But just as if you ask for the prices in a restaurant you really cannot afford to eat in, if he has to plead for the ultimate sporting status then he hasn’t done enough to achieve it.
That’s no criticism, because who the hell has?
Who could demand to be held in the same esteem as the most talented, the best looking, the funniest, the most courageous and most influential sportsman of all time?
That’s who Ali was to my eyes, a beautiful fighter and a beautiful man.
Someone whose name and face were known in every village in every country on every continent long before mass communications or social media, without doing telly ads for sportswear or WiFi hubs.
He didn’t need an agent or a marketing guru. He sold himself with his film-star looks and his razor-sharp patter, his flashing fists and his dancing feet.
He didn’t need a trademark, pre-planned celebration for the cameras, he came up with something new on the spot every time.
Most of all, he didn’t need to ask for approval. He told us he was The Greatest and who were we to argue? Bolt, for all his medals and his records, has never had a proper rival, the Connors to his McEnroe or Watson to his Nicklaus.
Ali had Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.
Bolt has never had to prove himself capable of a comeback the way Ali did not once, but twice, becoming the only man to be crowned world heavyweight champion three times.
Bolt didn’t come to fame in an era of blatant racial discrimination, he didn’t have the pressure of a cause weighing down on his shoulders.
Ali lost three years at the peak of his powers — 1967 to 1970 — after being jailed for refusing to go to war.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong” and he was banned from the ring.
While comparing sports is like multiplying apples and oranges, let’s never forget that Bolt gets to do his thing without some 15-stone bruiser trying to punch him into next Tuesday.
Though right now, that might make the 100 metres a little more interesting.