Blog: Usain Bolt - The Face of the Sport
Ok, in case you weren’t convinced, Usain Bolt is a global superstar, and is easily the face of our sport. Track and field desperately needed a face heading into the Olympics, with Bolt appearing at the forefront and taking over the sport’s throne, but yesterday he showed why everyone needs to notice when he races. He is track and field!
No one cares about track and field. I mean, you and I do, but the general sporting public in the U.S. doesn’t care. That changed just a bit yesterday, when I saw that ESPN, YahooSports and USA Today all featured Bolt’s world record performance on their front pages, as one of the top 1-2 articles of the day. USA Today went one better by having it as the second largest story of the day, behind Tiger Woods’ dramatic loss. Furthermore, if you look at the comments section of each piece, there are hundreds (thousands in YahooSports’ case) of comments left by sports enthusiasts. This shows me that people care about Bolt, with the type of connection few athletes can create.
When people think of world wide celebrity athletes, Tiger Woods comes up #1 easily, with Lance Armstrong probably right behind or LeBron James or Kobe Bryant (he’s much more popular than James in Asia, which is a HUGE market). However, I’d venture to say that Bolt has the potential to be #2 in the world. Track and field is a global sport, no event is easier to understand than the 100m dash and the tag “the World’s Fastest Man” is the most notable tag you can be given in the entire athletic world.
Lets hope the IAAF, Puma, Bolt’s agent and support staff all realize that Bolt is one of a kind and needs to be marketed as such. He is more talented than Michael Johnson, equally as charasmatic as Carl Lewis and millions of dollars need to be poured into marketing Bolt over the next few years. Track and field needs a Tiger Woods, it needs a Lance Armstrong, and Usain Bolt is that athlete.
