Usain Bolt in Beijing: The Fastest Man Alive
2008 · event
On the evening of 16 August 2008 the final of the hundred metres at the Beijing Olympics lasted less than ten seconds and is still being watched. Usain Bolt, a twenty one year old from a small town in Jamaica, was clear of the field by seventy metres, spread his arms, slapped his chest and crossed the line already celebrating. The clock read nine point six nine seconds, a world record set by a man who had stopped running properly before the end.
Bolt had grown up in Sherwood Content in Trelawny and had come to sprinting from cricket. At one metre ninety six he was considered too tall for the hundred metres, since taller athletes lose time getting out of the blocks, and his coach Glen Mills built a technique around the enormous stride that followed. Four days later he won the two hundred metres in nineteen point three zero, breaking a record that had stood since 1996, and then took a third gold in the relay.
A year later in Berlin he ran the hundred metres in nine point five eight and the two hundred in nineteen point one nine. Both records still stand and neither has been seriously approached. He went on to win the sprint titles again in London and in Rio, the only sprinter to take the individual Olympic double three times.
Bolt gave athletics something it had lacked, a figure who was both untouchable and openly enjoying himself, and he did it in a sport that had spent years defending itself against doping scandals. His races are used in schools to teach biomechanics, and his last hundred metres in Beijing remains the clearest illustration of a simple fact, that he could have gone faster.