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The athletic year ended on a fitting note with its dominant protagonists crowned 2008 World Athletes of the Year at the World Athletics Gala in Monte Carlo on Sunday night.
We knew who it would be long before it was announced. Such has been their performance this year that to consider any other name for the year-end awards would have almost been blasphemous.
The two - Usain Bolt and Yelena Isinbayeva - are indeed the modern day 'greats', inspiring athletes and undisputed champions, and record-breaking performers. I hope I have not left out any other criteria to qualify them as true 'greats'.
The stress on the word 'great' is deliberate at this point when it is the most debased in sports vocabulary. As a friend and noted columnist Suresh Menon put it in his inimitable style in one of his writings recently, "it is convenient, crisp, and to the great delight of headline writers, has only five letters. As a bonus, it rhymes with other sporting staples such as 'fate', 'late', 'rate', 'wait' and so on."
So, the next obvious, and odious, question is: What makes a great sportsman? True talent, obviously. Rare ability to pursue a professional goal at great personal sacrifice. And of course, a steady head, a big heart and nerves of steel come in handy apart from other technical and psychological qualities.
Bolt and Usain have all these in abundance and much more in reserve. Bolt has raised a simple sport of running from point 'A' to point 'B' into a breathtaking art form as he did at the Beijing Olympics winning three gold medals, all in record-breaking fashion.
Isinbayeva, on the other hand, has made a complex sport of defying gravity and risking great injury look so simple. When she is in action, the sport of pole vault is like outdoor gymnastics - to borrow another overused clichŽ, it is poetry in motion.
Like Bolt, Isinbayeva also won her gold medal with a world record and promptly and predictably declared that the London Olympics will be their next target.
The other aspect I like about the two is that they are the ultimate entertainers and unmatched when it comes to marketability. They enjoy doing what they do best and revel under the spotlight with no inhibition whatsoever.
Bolt's signature Jamaican To the world dance has endeared him to millions though IOC chief Jacques Rogge found the ending of his victory jig with him leaning back and pointing two fingers up into the sky a bit unsporting.
Similarly, Isinbayeva's undiluted joy and the 70mm smile she flashed after setting a new world record of 5.05 metres in Beijing will remain etched in our memories. Sprints and pole vault will not be the same once these two finally bow out.
Take sprints, for instance, before Bolt arrived on the scene. It was caught in myriad controversies, devastated by sordid scandals involving drugs and bruised egos and devoid of stars.
Wild allegations marred even simple victories in minor championships while new records were viewed with mistrust. The needle of suspicion pointed towards almost everyone at the starting blocks.
The 22-year-old Jamaican was refreshingly different though he had to bear the brunt of repeated tests. He restored the much-needed showmanship and made sprints look glamorous again. More pertinently, he has shown that world records can be set without the help of any illegal substance.
Kim Collins, who finished well behind Bolt in the 200m, best summed up the champion. "He's not human," said Collins of Bolt in Beijing.
Similar sentiments can be spared for Isinbayeva too. Pole vault was a lonely sport before she arrived on the scene. Confined to a corner of a stadium, pole vaulters performed in front of near empty stands and well after everyone else had left for the day.
But today, Isinbayeva has converted it into a popular sport and stands fill up fast as this event begins as it happened in Beijing for both the women's and men's events.
To put into perspective Isinbayeva's contribution to this sport here is a bit of a statistic. It needed three athletes - Emma George (Australia), Stacy Dragila (US) and Svetlana Feofanova (Russia) - to painstakingly push the pole vault record from 4.45 metres to 4.81 metres between 1996 to 2002.
Since then, the 26-year-old former Russian Army lieutenant has been lonely at the top. In this period, Isinbayeva has single-handedly raised the bar on 24 occasions and today it stands at a new high of 5.05 and poised to go higher.
Records will continue to fall for sure ... at least as long as Bolt and Isinbayeva continue to chase them.
