Usain Bolt ran 9.58 seconds in the World Championship 100 metres final in Berlin on 16 August 2009. Tyson Gay finished second in 9.71, which would have been a world record eighteen months earlier.
The shape of the run
Bolt’s reaction time was not exceptional and his first thirty metres were not the fastest in the field. What separated the run was the segment between 60 and 80 metres, covered at a speed of roughly 44.7 kilometres per hour — the fastest any human has been recorded moving under his own power.
At 1.95m he took 41 strides to Gay’s 45. The conventional wisdom before him was that a sprinter that tall could not get out of the blocks quickly enough to matter. He got out well enough, and then had a stride length nobody could answer.
Seventeen years
The record has not been approached. A handful of sprinters have run in the low 9.7s; none has broken 9.6. Track surfaces and shoe technology have both improved in the interim, which makes the gap more striking rather than less.
Bolt also ran 19.19 for 200 metres at the same championships. That record has lasted equally well and is discussed considerably less.
