EDITORIAL - Jacques Rogge's legendary folly

Jacques Rogge has a real shot at being a legend. But not because of great deeds that will be romanticised in their telling and morphed into myths.

The president of the International Olympic Committee will not be conceived as Midas, of a golden tongue, or as a giant towering into the clouds. Rather, the perception of Mr Rogge is likely to be a man mean of spirit and Lilliputian in outlook who came close to bringing the Olympic movement, in particular the London Games, into disrepute, exemplified by his undignified jousting over Usain Bolt's status as an athlete.

Therein lies the possibility of Mr Rogge's legendary status: a legend defined as someone whose notoriety becomes the source of exaggerated tales.

At the Beijing Games in 2008, when young Bolt slowed, beat his chest, and then, with hands spread wide, shattered the 100m record - before going on to be just as dominant in the 200m - Mr Rogge accused him of unsportsmanlike behaviour. He had supposedly disrespected his fellow competitors.

Mr Rogge also got himself all tied up in knots over Bolt's other bits of showmanship, including the runner's now-famous archer or lightning bolt pose. We thought Mr Rogge was merely a sourpuss, ultra-traditionalist hankering for a notion of the Olympics that perhaps was for the original Games and of little relevance in these times. He would get over it if he were to preside over a modern Olympic movement.

After his accomplishments of Beijing, Bolt declared that his aim was to become a legend, which he felt would be achieved if he successfully defended his sprint titles in London. Mission accomplished. Bolt declares himself a legend.

The modest thing, perhaps, was for Bolt to have others brand him legend. Put it down to impetuosity of youth, unbearable arrogance even.

Rogge on the fringe

Of the billions of people who would have witnessed Bolt's feats in Beijing and London, either at stadia or on television, few, Jacques Rogge among them, would see the achievements other than heroic and legendary, the stuff from which great tales are spun. Fewer still would have had Jacques Rogge's courage, or, more correctly, gumption to question that the feats, and the man himself, had indeed become legend.

Rogge managed what, in the circumstance, was a parsimonious assessment of "iconic" Bolt. To be worthy of legendary status he would have to prove himself at maybe two more Games.

Mr Rogge has been contorting on a smorgasbord of semantics in a vain attempt to extricate himself from this field of pettiness where he finds little or no support.

Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the London Olympics, for example, has put Bolt-like distance between himself and Mr Rogge, and not only because of Lord Coe's Jamaican connection. A great-great-great-great-great-grandfather owned an 18th-century plantation in the Clark's Town region of Trelawny.

Said Coe: "Usain Bolt is clearly a legend - no one else has ever won back-to-back 100 metres and 200 metres."

As we might say in Jamaica: Argument done! Unless, that is, the hapless Mr Rogge still harbours notions of a debate.

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