There are few things in sport as exciting as pure speed. Remember the stodgy start to the Rio Olympics? The empty seats, the greasy drizzle, the sense of an entire Games drifting into the arena of the unwell? Usain Bolt fixed that, instantly and without argument, by turning up, goofing about waving at people, and then running as fast as humans ever have for a combined total of one minute and 40 seconds, erasing everything else outside that brilliant, luminous moment.
In his American football novel End Zone, Don DeLillo spends a lot of time marvelling at the speed of his fictional running back Taft Robinson. “Speed is the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up,” DeLillo writes, and you kind of get what he means. For all the cladding, the fine points of craft and tactics, there will always be some part of us tapping our foot, a little glazed, nodding politely as the coffee is passed round, just craving a little bump of the pure stuff.
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