Diamond League plans for a future without main attraction Usain Bolt
It was not even Christmas when the press release landed: “World’s fastest man Usain Bolt to race in London next summer”.
More than seven months before this July’s London Anniversary Games, the organisers could sit back safe in the knowledge that the hardest part of their job was done and the public would flock to see their hero.
There is a necessary sense of give and take here. For three of the past four years, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced tax breaks for athletes competing at the Anniversary Games. On the one occasion when Bolt was subject to the UK’s stringent income tax laws, he boycotted the event. The Chancellor gives and Bolt takes. Call it a perk of being one of the biggest sporting stars on the planet.
As the Diamond League series begins in Doha this Friday, the lengths to which the money men will go to secure their headline act expose a major dilemma facing the sport.
“When Bolt leaves, it is a high-class problem,” Sebastian Coe, International Association of Athletics Federations president, has admitted. “Will our sport survive it? Yes. But we need to work even harder.” Amid such a background it is almost unfathomable that the Diamond League remains without a headline sponsor to its name.
While Bolt will be absent in Doha – sticking to his tried-and-tested policy of opening his international season at a low-level meet in the Czech Republic – there will nonetheless be dozens of the finest athletes in the world on display.
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