As One Star Waxes Another Star Wanes

GOLF - Like the rest of the world we watched in awe as Usain Bolt took the levels of achievement in athletics to unparalelled heights. By setting a new 100 metres world record of 9.58 seconds Bolt has not only established himself as the best sprinter of all time, he has also made people re-evaluate what it takes to be a top sprinter. The percieved wisdom was that to run fast you could be tall, but not too tall; you had to be powerfully built; and you had to possess unstinting focus and determination at all to times. Bolt is the antithesis of this prototype. He is very tall, gangly with it, and he larks about before his races as if he is about to compete in the school egg and spoon race. Athletics coaches around the world have seen that a man possessing a different type of body shape to the norm can run amazing times, and as such expect to see more young sprinters in the mould of Bolt appearing on the scene over the next few years. Whether they can match his freakish times is a different matter altogether.

But while the world reflects on Bolt's amazing performance, another failure by a different sporting legend has gone by relatively unnoticed. For the first time ever, Tiger Woods lost a major golf tournament having led going into the final round. Woods finished second in the US PGA on five under, three shots behind the South Korean YE Yang. The loss means that Woods remains on fourteen major tournament wins, four behind the record held by Jack Nicklaus.

The question we are posing is this: is Tiger Woods a golfer in decline? Now, do not get us wrong. We are not for one moment saying Woods has become a bad golfer overnight. Far from it. After all, he has just finished second in a major. However, Woods is making more mistakes than ever before. The Woods of a decade ago would not have made the putting errors that cost him the PGA tournament. Not only that, but the Woods of a decade ago would not have missed the cut in a major, as he did when he played the British Open last month.

loserscomesecond think the fear factor that Woods once possessed has now gone. Like all great sportsmen, his mere presence was sometimes enough to intimidate his opponents into making mistakes, but we feel that has now disappeared. Other golfers out there will for sure still respect him, of course they will, but will they fear him? We do not think so. Tiger Woods will continue to be priced up by the bookies for golf tournaments at prohibitively short odds, but the time has now come to oppose him. Woods is not the player he once was.