media_artricles :: 2015

Track’s rise, cricket’s fall

IN 1967, the celebrated English author Sir Neville Cardus wrote that no cricketer had “proven versatility of skill as convincingly as Sobers has done, effortlessly and after the manner born”.

Through a career lasting 30 years in the second half of the 20th century, Garry Sobers, the multi-talented left-hander from Barbados, epitomised West Indies cricket while enhancing its already established global reputation for excellence.

Almost half a century on, the towering Usain Bolt, the supreme sprinter, has become the Sobers of athletics. As Sobers did with cricket, he has inspired the upsurge of his sport as the supreme exemplar of the quality among the tiny Anglo-Caribbean territories, principally, but not exclusively, his own Jamaica.

Echoing Cardus’ words on Sobers, Michael Johnson, the great American 400 metres champion, said of Bolt after his three gold medals at the on-going IAAF World Championships in Beijing: “There’s no-one quite like him, not on the track and certainly not off the track.”

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