| 10 metres in less than 1 second!!! |
Tanvir Khan
Usain Bolt accelerated from nought…Then, he started flying. Well, the time you take to read the first paragraph of this article is the time Usain Bolt will take to get past the 100 metre stretch on the track. You-blink-and-you-miss. That is Usain Bolt for you. Statistically speaking, this guy takes less than a second to cover 10 metres. Isn’t that breathtaking?
Lightning quick, thunderous, Jamaican Bullet, whatever you call him, it will never be sufficient to explain his speed in words. He is the fastest man on the planet. No one in the history of athletics or Olympics (starting 1896) had run a 100 metre dash in 9.69 seconds until Usain ‘Lightning’ Bolt did so. He also became the ONLY athlete to break the 100 and 200 metres records in the same Olympics. Truly incredible performance.
In the Olympic 100 m final, Bolt broke the new ground of 9.69 s. This was an improvement upon his own world record, and he was well ahead of the runner-up Richard Thompson, who had finished in 9.89 s. The wind speed of +0.0 m/s too, was favourable. The lull was there, and the ‘Bolt storm’ blew away the Bird’s Nest.
But the fact that he had slowed down to celebrate his victory ‘much’ before he actually sped past the finish line with the ribbon stuck to his chest, prevented him from attaining a sub 9.60 second time. To add to it, Bolt ran quite a part of the dash with his shoe laces untied.
Based upon the speed of Bolt`s opening 60 m, he could have finished with a time of 9.52 seconds!!! After scientific analysis of Bolt`s run by the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, Hans Eriksen and his colleagues also predicted a sub 9.60 sec time. Considering factors such as Bolt`s position, acceleration and velocity in comparison with second-place-finisher Thompson, the team estimated that Bolt could have finished in 9.55 s had he not slowed to celebrate before the finishing line.
All the glory in the event that he had added to his armour only a few months before the Olympics! Phenomenal. What if he had been practicing it for more than a year or so? Don’t calculate or you’ll have goose bumps.
It wasn’t just the 9.69 seconds of glory. Bolt went on to set records in the 200 metres the following day and 4X100 metres two days later. Unlike the 100 metre sprint, Bolt sprinted hard to cross the finish line and also dipped his chest to improve his time. He finished glorious in 19.30 seconds, the best ever, again. He shattered Michael Johnson’s record of 19.32 seconds despite running against a headwind of 0.9 seconds.
Two days later, Bolt ran as the third leg in the Jamaican 4x100 metres relay team, increasing his gold medal total to three. Along with team mates Nesta Carter, Michael Frater, and Asafa Powell, Bolt broke yet another world and Olympic record because their 37.10 sec finish broke the previous record by three-tenths of a second.
All this certainly cannot be human, even though I know I’m arguing the wrong way.
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