Usain Bolt is considered the best sprinter in history, but has revealed how close it was to never execute what became its pet event in the Olympic Games: the 100 -meter sprint.
Bolt still has world records in the events of 100, 200 my 4 x 100m, with its 9.58 seconds for the 100 -meter sprint established in 2009. It has the fastest time recorded for a 100 m sprint.
The Jamaican initially began as a 200 -meter sprinter when his coach Glen Mills urged him to execute the 400m, which believed he would help Bolt’s performance in the 200 m events.
Bolt was more interested in the Sprint of 100 meters and made a bet with Mills in 2007, a year before his Olympic debut, and the rest is history.
“After the world championship in Osaka, we were talking about what we had to do and he says: ‘You need to enter the gym and you also need to organize another event,’ and he wanted him to do the 400 meters,” he said in Podcast Ready Set Go.
“I thought, ‘Very well, let’s make a bet. Let me run a 100 meters. If I run fast, I run the 100 meters, if I run slowly, I run the 400 meters.’ I thought I was going to run slowly.
“I will never forget, Wallace and I [Spearmon] They were in that race, it was in Greece, and I thought: “I just want to reach 10.1, if I can reach 10.1, I think that’s fast enough,” and he said: “If you run 10.1 it is excellent.”
“When I ran and ran 10.03, I thought, ‘You can’t say no’, because then there were 9.8 and 9.7, all ran a regular 9.9, it was not constantly 9.8 [or] 9.7s.
“This is how I got. If I had run like 10.2, I would execute the 400 meters.”
Bolt appeared in the podcast together with the American rival Justin Gatlin and the Bahamian sprinter Rodney Green, and both were stunned by Jamaican’s revelation.
Bolt is shown with coach Mills in 2009, 12 months after he was announced with three gold medals at the Beijing Olympic Games. (Getty Images: Ian Walton)
“That moment at the time the gun shot, if there was a 10.22, we would have been watching a 400 -meter bolt instead of a 100 -meter bolt,” Gatlin said.
“I would never have executed the 100 after that.”
“It would have been good [at the 400 metres] Also, but I hate training, “Bolt replied.
“You would never have seen me in the 100 meters, only two and four would be, like Michael Johnson. It doesn’t matter how fast I was running, my coach always said that maybe I should change.”
The following year, after winning his bet with Mills, Bolt announced himself as the main act in athletics with the first of the eight Olympic gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Bolt finally withdrew when he won the gold medal in the events of 100 MY 200m in three consecutive Olympic Games.
