From poetry in verse, to poetry in motion on the track.

Alas, Miss Lou died two years ago, before anyone imagined Usain Bolt dashing off three gold medals, in three world record times, leading Jamaicans to outpace the world.


The fastest man and the fastest woman on earth are from that Caribbean island populated by 2.8 million citizens – a hundred times fewer than the United States of America, 20 times less than the UK. Jamaica's sweep of blue riband events raises questions. People on drugs ran the 100 metres in 9.85 – Bolt, apparently with no drugs, no wind at his back, and no effort ran 9.69.

A little bit inside us has become dulled by pharmaceutical tampering in sports so that we struggle to allow ourselves to unreservedly enjoy Bolt toying with the rest of mankind. We have difficulty sharing the joke of Shelly-Ann Fraser, Jamaica's new women's 100 metres champion when she tells us: "The secret is Reggae power."

Well, if it's not drugs and it's not in the soul, what gives this financially poor island race more than an edge in the most basic human performance? And why now?

Jamaicans themselves have a lot of answers, from root vegetables to the God's gift allowing them to erupt out of the fabled West Indian laid-back lifestyle. Maybe Dr William Aiken, a leading West Indian urologist, was ahead of the game when he wrote, two years ago, a paper on what makes his countrymen and women run. He suggests a link between Jamaica producing the fastest humans in both genders at the same time that it suffers some of the world's highest incidences of prostate cancer, crime and promiscuity.

"Those are both," the doctor suggests, "manifestations of high levels of aggressiveness and drive, high libidos, highly efficient muscles from persons of lean body mass and black ethnicity. All these relate to high testosterone or high responsiveness of testosterone receptors."

Aiken finds genetic reason for super-charged human performance. "I believe," he wrote, "the answer lies in the slave ship routes within the Caribbean and the New World."

He theorises that Africans who survived the trek across the seas to the Caribbean were the fittest slaves; and slaves who made it as far as Jamaica and the Bahamas, the most westerly islands, must have been the fittest of the fit. He deduces that they had aggressive determination and efficient, responsive lean muscles. And those might be the characteristics leaving the rest of us trailing in Jamaica's wake.

Other scientists have long said that Jamaicans, and others of West African descent, benefit from "fast twitch" muscle fibres, making them literally born to move faster.

If we buy those educated theories, we must ask what has been holding Jamaica back until 2008?

The answers are complex. The island is a former British colony, steeped in our gentlemen and players legacy. Jamaicans always were quick – Arthur Wint won the 100m dash in the 1948 London Olympics, Herb McKenley won four sprint medals in 1948 and 1952, and it continued through the decades with Don Quarrie in the 1970s and Marlene Ottey, the queen of sprinting through the 1980s and 1990s.

Some Jamaicans were lured abroad to fame, and sometimes infamy. Linford Christie ran in a British vest, Ben Johnson and Donovan Bailey for Canada, Sanya Richards now competes for America.

Their bloodline is Jamaican. However, Christie and Johnson failed dope tests. Their prowess was devalued by dubious additives, and fast twitch muscles or the burning desire of a once-enslaved people do not tell the whole story. Money plays a part. Olympians were supposedly unpaid until 1984, by which time cricket consumed the islanders, and Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose and Michael Holding converted raw pace and power to bowling at 150km per hour.

We might gasp at the 6ft 5in Bolt, but the West Indies unleashed some even bigger physical specimens to knock over former colonial cricket masters. Joel Garner, the Big Bird from Barbados, was 6ft 8in, and only marginally taller than Ambrose, Walsh and company.

Those fiercely swift descendents of slaves have lately turned from old school cricket to more lucrative basketball scholarships in the US. And 40 years before them, world record sprinter Dennis Johnson studied the athletic programme at San Jose State University before going home to plant the seeds of the Jamaica University of Technology (UTECH) sporting system that gave Asafa Powell and Usain Bolt their wings.

UTECH doesn't have America's financial muscle or fine facilities, but it has the potential of 280 student sprinters.

No-one knows, or no-one is saying, if athletes bringing home American sports programming also developed anything as corrupt as the BALCO laboratory where top American and some British sprinters got their dope. The Californian drugs factory was busted, and led former world record sprinters Marion Jones and her former husband Tim Montgomery to jail.

Unless we have proof, we must not go the whole way down the route of suspicion. As Ethiopians and Kenyans feel born to distance running, the West Indians seem just as inclined to run swift and short. Go to the Rift Valley and you see children in their droves running miles to and from school; Jamaicans start out at seven or eight running as fast as their little legs would carry them on waste ground.

Dr Herb Elliott, Jamaica's Olympic team doctor and a member of the International Amateur Athletics Federation medical and anti-doping commission, explains the clean sweep of sprinting medals as the natural harvest of half a century of Jamaican ability. "We have these new tracks. We have better nutrition, we have better coaching techniques," he says. "When I ran, or when other Jamaicans ran, we didn't know so much about biomechanics and these kinds of things."

Elliott recently told the Christian Science Monitor that Americans scout Jamaica talents, but claims some come back "tired and mediocre".

Bolt can be many things, mediocre is not one of them. "I just blew my mind today," Bolt said after lowering the 12-year-old record of American Michael Johnson in the 200 metres. "I blew the world's mind."

Caribbean cousins have been doing it in a number of sports. The best Dutch era in football had players from Surinam stock, like Ruud Gullit. John Barnes is Jamaican, Theo Walcott from Jamaican stock. The French 1998 World Cup winners leaned heavily on its Caribbean territories, and still does. Thierry Henry's speed probably came not from the Paris suburbs, but from two French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique where his father and mother grew up.

Today is Bolt's time. He, you might say, is liberating his great, great grandfather's endowment. Louise Bennett's verse in 1966 put it this way:

"What an islan! What a people!

Man an woman, old an young

Jus a pack dem bag an baggage

An turn history upside dung!"