Usain Bolt at World Championships 2017: Jamaican legend ends his career, and we will never see his like again
Olympic superstar will finally bring the curtain down on his career running his last race over 100m at the World Athletics Championships in London
ANYTHING is possible has always been his mantra.
Winning title after title, smashing world records and pushing sprinting into a whole new stratosphere.
For a decade since winning the first major medal of his career in 2007 Usain Bolt has lit up track and field and on Saturday August 5 he will finally bring the curtain down on his career running his final race over 100m at the World Athletics Championships in London.
Back at the Olympic Stadium where he won three golds in 2012.
Once in a blue moon a sporting superstar comes along. Pele, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan.
And Bolt's achievements have catapulted him into sporting immortality alongside them.
In Rio last summer he amassed the triple-triple of Olympic golds.
Even having to hand one back since - a relay gold from Beijing 2008 - after Jamaican team-mate Nesta Carter tested positive did not diminish his achievements.
In clinching his third Olympic 100m crown last summer he became the first track athlete to win a hat-trick of medals in the same event.
And winning 100m gold at London 2017 will mean he has 12 world titles, the only blot on his record coming when he famously false-started in the blue riband event at the 2011 world championships in South Korea.
Added to that are his three world records in the 100m, 200m and the 4x100m.
Greatness, Immortality. Finally up there like he craved with legends such as Ali and Pele. Maybe even Bob Marley.
most read in sport
As he said last summer: "There’s nothing else I can do. I’ve proved to the world that I am the greatest.
“This is why it is my last Olympics because I can’t prove anything else. This was one more step to go. One more step up to these guys. Ali. Pele."
As for Jamaican legend Bob Marley too?
"That's not for me to say. But if Bob Marley were alive and he was going to write a song about me then I think it should be called THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME"
Bolt, who will be 31 next month, would probably have been happy to hang up his spikes last summer but part of him also wanted to bring the curtain down on his career in London - a place where he has felt at home for years.
Yet again only one man stands between Bolt and the world title and that is Justin Gatlin.
The two-time drug cheat who Bolt famously beat to the 100m, 200m and 4x100m world crowns last summer but the last sprinter to finish ahead of him over the distance back in Rome in 2012.
Gatlin, running world leading times at the age of 35 and poised to rain on Bolt's farewell parade with the nightmare scenario of a doper standing on top of the podium.
But year after year, championship after championship Bolt has delivered the goods when it mattered.
Hopefully next month will be no exception providing a fitting farewell to his track career.
I've been privileged to have been in a stadium to witness all of his Olympic golds, all of his world titles and all of his world records.
And I'm not sure if such achievements on a track will happen again in anyone's lifetime never mind mine.
