Usain Bolt - file

Sports fans, particularly those of track and field, will be focusing their attention on Monte Carlo this weekend. The winners of the 2008 World Athlete of the Year Awards will be announced live during the World Athletics Gala, which will take place in Monaco next Sunday.

Triple gold medallist Usain Bolt, the man picked by many as the outstanding performer at the recent Beijing Olympics, is poised to be the star of the show. He is among three finalists for the 2008 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Male Athlete of the Year.

Bolt will be competing for the title with Cuba's 110 metres hurdles world-record holder and Olympic gold medallist, Dayron Robles, and Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele, the Olympic 5,000m and 10,000 winner.

Among the females, the finalists are Ethiopia's Tirunesh Dibaba, who also won 5,000m and 10,000m gold medals in Beijing, pole vault gold medal winner Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia and Kenya's teenage sensation, the 800m gold medallist Pamela Jelimo.

Distance runner

Jamaica's Bolt is also on the shortlist and is the hot favourite for another title, the Performance of the Year. Three male performances have been nominated with Bolt featuring in two - his world-record run in the 100 metres, clocking 9.69 seconds, and his scorching run in the 200m where he lowered the 12-year-old record of the great American, Michael Johnson. His lone rival is veteran Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie, who clocked 3:03.59 to register the world's first ever sub-two hours and four minutes marathon in Berlin on September 28.

While appreciating the great runs by Robles and Bekele at the Games, it is difficult to see them getting the nod ahead of the showman Bolt. Bolt not only broke his records on the world's biggest sporting stage, but he did it in style.

In the 100m, he literally dropped his arms 15 metres from the line and still went three-hundredths of a second below the previous mark and equalled the biggest ever winning margin. Then, after running seven races in four days, Bolt hit the track for his eighth race and lowered a mark of which, many said, would have lasted for another generation and finishing well over half a second ahead of his nearest rival.

Gebrselassie's marathon record was an excellent run, but Bolt's performance came during the Olympic Games when there was a lot of pressure to perform at the highest level.

My female Athlete of the Year is Russia's Yelena Isinbayeva who, like Bolt, set a her world record at the Games with a leap of 5.05m on August 18, her fourth world mark of the year. I also select the Russian for the Female Performance of the Year for her leap at the Games.

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