Usain Bolt opens European season

OSTRAVA, Czech Republic - Agence France-Presse

Jamaican sprint king Bolt admits that he is mainly focusing on the 2012 Olympics. REUTERS photo

Usain Bolt will open his European track season tonight full of confidence, in top shape and eyeing the ultimate prize - more Olympic medals.

The talk in athletics in any Olympic year is of the revered Games themselves, when track and field take centre stage at the world’s largest sporting event.

Bolt revolutionized sprinting, and indeed athletics, four years ago in Beijing, setting world records when winning the 100 and 200m titles, and also starring in a record-breaking Jamaican quartet in the 4x100m relay.

The 25-year-old Jamaican left the Chinese capital as one of the most recognisable figures in world sport, unbelievably going on to beat both his individual sprint marks with new times (9.58 and 19.19 seconds) in the Berlin worlds in 2009.

He takes to the track in this eastern Czech city for the sixth time on Friday, seemingly brimming with confidence that he will be unbeatable come the London Games (and before) given his recent injury-free run and impressive form.

“I’m definitely on the good path, the right track. I’ve been injury free and I’m looking to doing extremely well at the Olympics,” Bolt said.

The Jamaican will be up against, among others, Dwain Chambers, the Briton having served a drugs ban and now cleared to race in the Olympics after the Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS) overturned a British Olympic Association bylaw that banned doping cheats for life.

“For me, rules are rules,” said Bolt. “If the rules say it’s okay for him to compete, who am I to say otherwise?”

Bolt’s 200m meeting record of 19.83sec, set before his Beijing heroics in 2008, could come under threat from American duo Walter Dix and Wallace Spearmon.

“I’m really looking forward to running for the first time in Ostrava,” said Dix, the reigning double world sprint silver medalist whose best is 19.53 sec.