The Cricket Kid Who Was Too Fast
Usain Bolt grew up in Sherwood Content, a small town in Jamaica, where his parents ran the local grocery store. As a boy, he mostly played cricket and football in the street with his brother. By the age of twelve, he was the fastest runner at his school over 100 metres.
It was his cricket coach who noticed. Seeing how quick Bolt was on the pitch, the coach urged him to try track and field. Even then, Bolt loved a joke more than training. Before one important race, he hid in the back of a van as a prank, and the police got involved.
But the talent was impossible to ignore. At the 2002 World Junior Championships, held in front of a home crowd in Kingston, 15-year-old Bolt, already 1.95 metres tall, won the 200 metres and became the youngest world junior gold medallist ever. He was so nervous that he put his shoes on the wrong feet, though he spotted it before the race began.
The Night He Slowed Down and Still Won
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Bolt won the 100 metres final in 9.69 seconds, a new world record. What stunned people was how he did it. There was no helpful wind, he visibly slowed down to celebrate before the finish line, and one of his shoelaces was untied.
Scientists at the University of Oslo later studied the race. They estimated that he could have finished in about 9.55 seconds if he had kept running hard.
Days later he won the 200 metres in 19.30 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson's world record even while running into a headwind. That made him the first sprinter to break both records at the same Olympics. After the race, Happy Birthday played over the stadium speakers, because he turned 22 at midnight.
He also won the 4 × 100 metres relay in Beijing. That gold was taken away in 2017, after a teammate's retested sample showed a banned substance. Bolt himself never failed a drug test.
9.58
One year later, at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, Bolt ran the fastest 100 metres in history: 9.58 seconds. He cut more than a tenth of a second off his own record, the biggest jump in the event since electronic timing began. That record still stands.
During that run, he reached a top speed of 12.32 metres per second, about 44 km/h, the fastest a human has ever been recorded running.
Days later, he broke his own 200 metres world record as well, running 19.19 seconds and winning by the biggest margin in World Championships history.
The setting made it even more special. It was the same stadium, and the same month, where Jesse Owens had won worldwide fame 73 years earlier. Before Bolt left, the Mayor of Berlin presented him with a 12-foot section of the Berlin Wall, saying he had shown that walls once thought impossible to overcome could be torn down. The nearly three-ton slab was shipped to a military museum in Kingston.
The Triple-Triple and One Last Race
Bolt kept winning. At the 2012 London Olympics and again at the 2016 Rio Olympics, he took both the 100 and 200 metres titles. That makes him the only sprinter to win both events at three Olympics in a row. In Rio he also won the relay, completing what became known as the triple-triple: three sprint golds at three straight Games.
The ending was painful. At the 2017 World Championships, in his last solo race, he finished third in the 100 metres. Then, running the final leg for Jamaica in the relay, in what was meant to be his very last race, he pulled up with a hamstring injury and collapsed. He refused a wheelchair and crossed the line one final time with help from his teammates.
After retiring, he chased an old dream of playing professional football. He trained with the Central Coast Mariners in Australia and scored two goals in a friendly, but in 2019 he announced that his sports life was over. Playing in one friendly match in Norway, he wore the number 9.58.
