Usain Bolt is a 6’5″, 210-lb mutant with scoliosis who has gone from dominating the 200-meter dash to the 100-meter — without really trying:
When the other men reach their top speed, their limit, Usain Bolt continues to accelerate. By the fifty-meter mark, he has caught up to the leader. By the sixty-meter mark, a noticeable gap has emerged between him and the rest of the pack. By the seventy-meter mark, he is covering more than twelve meters of ground — about forty feet — every second, a pace faster than the speed limit for automobiles in most neighborhoods. Nobody has ever moved this fast before under his own power. Usain Bolt’s top speed is simply significantly higher than anyone else’s, ever.
His top speed is such a spectacle, so phenomenal, so searing that many who witness this race, who see Bolt cross the line in 9.69 seconds, breaking his own three-month-old world record by three hundredths of a second, don’t notice, until they see the replay, what is perhaps the most salient and frightening thing about his performance: Approximately eighty meters into the race, twenty meters from the finish line, Bolt stops trying. It happens right after he throws a quick glance to the right, toward lane seven, the lane of his chief rival, a fellow Jamaican named Asafa Powell who held the world record before Bolt did. Prior to the start of the race, Bolt believed Powell was his only credible threat. Now seeing that Powell is nowhere in sight, that, indeed, no other runner is visible, Bolt lets something like a smile cross his lips. Then his arms stop pumping. He drops them to his sides, pulls his shoulders back, pushes his chest out, splays his fingers. His legs continue to cycle, but he no longer provides them additional impetus. He coasts. Several meters before he crosses the finish line, a full half second before he wins the 100-meter final by one of the widest margins in Olympic history, he brings his right fist up and thumps his chest.
Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, “hasn’t been born yet.”
The secret to success as a sprinter might just be not training too hard:
Glen Mills, who has been Bolt’s coach since 2005, is down on the field, watching another one of his runners skip sideways down a row of hurdles, the young man’s legs kicking up and over each one like a chorus girl’s. A digital stopwatch hangs from Mills’s thick neck, dangling just above his potbelly. Mills has close-cut gray hair, narrow eyes, a perpetually sardonic expression. Were someone to have charted a graph depicting Bolt’s story up to the point that Mills became his coach, it would have shown a steep parabolic trajectory, a rapid rise followed by a precipitous fall. Like many promising runners, Bolt had come out of nowhere, burned brightly for a few years — setting a number of junior records — then appeared to have burned out. In 2004, at seventeen years old, Bolt made the Jamaican national team and competed in that year’s Olympic Games in Athens, but his performance there was poor: He never made it past the first round in his only event, the 200 meters. His progress stalled, then reversed.
“When I got him, he was injured,” Mills says. “Also, his coordination and all those things were off. And his scoliosis was affecting his hamstring. So we had to do some work.” Much of that work consisted of not working so hard. Mills cut down on Bolt’s high-intensity workouts and put him instead on a training regimen that emphasized strength and flexibility, building up his core muscles to compensate for his problematic spine, honing Bolt’s body and technique until he was ready to fully harness his gift. Although Bolt continued to compete, for the two years of 2006 and 2007, he didn’t place first in any races. It wasn’t until 2008 that Mills’s training regimen came to fruition, and the world took notice of what had been taking root at this worn track on the grounds of an old Kingston sugar plantation.