by Usain Bolt
‘You know what?’ I thought. ‘Being a World Junior champ feels kinda nice!’
As the celebrations went on around me, I thought about what had happened to me out there, Mom’s chat on the verandah, my spikes on the wrong foot. For a second, I had lost it, my mind had gone, my race had stuttered, but I’d still won. How the hell had that happened? How I had walked out in front of an international crowd and dealt with the pressure? Damn, it all seemed pretty crazy to me.
I had landed as a track and field star. I had found mental strength when most athletes would have freaked. I had shut the jitters out and carried the burden of a nation’s hopes on my shoulders. Even better, I’d come through a champ. I knew that nothing was going to faze me after that. Pre-race nerves were done with; no pressure was going to mess with my mind. How could there be anything more stressful than the start line at the World Juniors in front of a crazy home crowd?
The penny dropped with me about how important confidence was to a sprinter, especially in a short event like the 200 metres where supreme mental strength was often the key difference between myself and some of the other racers in my meets. I knew I couldn’t let a negative thought cloud my judgement ever again, because mental strength was a tool in every race, it was as important as a fast start or a powerful drive phase. There was no opportunity for doubt because the contest was over in the blink of an eye. Distraction for one hundredth of a second might be enough to lose a race.
It was my first step to becoming an Olympic legend. As I walked around the National Stadium track I realised I was an athlete that lived for the moment, like the real superstars lived for the moment – The Big Moment. Whereas ordinary guys worried and quivered when they arrived on the Olympic or World Champs stage, the superstars, the Michael Johnsons and Maurice Greenes of this world, were excited by the pressures and the stresses. They moved up a notch, both physically and mentally. At The Big Moment, their performances rocked bells.
I figured I was capable of channelling that same mental power. The World Juniors had been my first Big Moment and I hadn’t collapsed under the weight of Jamaica’s expectation. During my celebratory salute to the fans, I was already mentally transformed. I was a world champ, I’d become the Lightning Bolt to the planet. It was my greatest ever race. Probably always will be.
* Class One was the under-19s event, Class Two was under-16s, Class Three was under-14s; I could have raced in the third class but I would have won too easily, so Coach McNeil placed me in the group above.
† Jermaine would later go on to win bronze in the 400 metres at the World Junior T&F Championships, set a Jamaican national senior 400 metre record and finish fourth in the 400 metres at the 2011 World Championships.
My winning the Junior Champs was so big that when I got home to Sherwood Content after my gold medal race, I was flown to Montego Bay, where a motorcade was waiting for me.
A motorcade.
Now that was big, ridiculously big. The roads that led home to Coxeath were lined with hundreds of people and, as the car passed, they chased after us, forcing their hands into the open window to touch me. All of them were screaming and shouting my name, yelling ‘Bolt! Bolt! Bolt!’ as they raced down the street. It was nearly as crazy as the reception I’d received back in the National Stadium.
I couldn’t believe it. I knew that Jamaicans had a lot of respect for their sports guys, especially in track and field, but a victory parade was something I hadn’t expected. Still, I guess I should have seen it coming. It was pretty clear that I was the dude of the moment. After my 200 win, I’d picked up silver medals in the 4x100 metre relay and 4x400 metre relay, setting national junior records in both with times of 39.15 seconds and 3:04.06 minutes respectively. Everyone was going wild for me.
That’s when I got a quick taste of what fame might be like. For some stupid reason, I’d decided to go for a walk into the seats with Jermaine Gonzales following my last race. Both of us had wanted to watch the girls’ 4x400 metres final, but the place was still ram-packed. Straightaway I knew I’d made a big mistake because as we tried to find a space everybody wanted to talk to me. And I mean everybody. All over the bleachers, people, strangers, were telling me that I was the future of Jamaican sport. I had never signed an autograph before in my life, but within minutes I must have signed dozens and dozens, hundreds maybe. The scraps of paper kept on coming, thick and fast. It took me two hours to get out of the crowd.
On the morning of my return to Trelawny, it was clear to me that I had become one of the most famous people in Jamaica. My face was all over the newspapers; fans were raving about me in bars. Radio and TV stations hyped me up. Luckily, my head stayed screwed on throughout all the craziness. Mom and Pops had taught me so much about respect that during the motorcade I said ‘Hello’ to everybody, just like I had done when I was little, even though it would have been much easier just to wave. People were getting pushy as they tried to shake my hand, but I kept myself humble. As I said, Dad was so serious when it came to manners. If I’d acted big time in public that day, he probably would have cut me off for good.
It was a different story at school, though. I was young, turning 16, and everybody at William Knibb knew who I was. Kids, students I had never even said ‘Hi’ to before, were telling me I was great. People looked up to me, and not just because I was so tall – I had achieved success on the world stage, which made me a big deal. Even the teachers changed their attitude. Some of them weren’t as tough as they had been before my success in the World Junior Championships. If my test scores were bad or I flunked an essay, they went easy on me.
The relaxed attitude didn’t last long, though. There were only so many tests I could fail, and once Pops got to hear about my poor scores he flipped. I was told that if I blew my end-of-year tests, then the principal, Miss Lee, would make me repeat the grade. That would mean a year of extra school fees, which the family didn’t really want to pay for, not if it could be avoided.
It was decided that I should get a tutor to help me out in the evenings and I was introduced to a guy called Norman Peart. Mr Peart was a tax officer working in Montego Bay and a part-time teacher with a solid reputation, who was previously a graduate of William Knibb and Jamaica College. He also had a history in the 800 metres, so he knew a few tricks when it came to balancing school work with track and field training. A timetable was fixed and we agreed Mr Peart would come around a couple of evenings a week. Between us, we planned on getting my crap together.
But there were distractions to deal with. I was the local superstar, and the girls of Trelawny wanted to hang out with a world champ, which was a cool discovery. Up until that point I had been naïve with the opposite sex. I was a country boy, and living in the sticks meant I had to learn the art of dating for myself, which was hard sometimes. There was nobody to teach me how to impress a girl I’d taken a shine to in class, and we didn’t have magazines telling us how to charm women like they did in America or Europe. If I’d lived in a city like Kingston it might have been different, I could have picked up information by watching the people around me. In Coxeath I had to work out The Game on my own.
Before I go on, I want to explain how it is with dating in Jamaica because, believe me, the scene is pretty different to the way it is in Europe, Australia or the States. In the Caribbean, guys play around a lot, and even though the girls don’t like it, that way of life seems to be accepted for some reason, especially among teenagers. It was the same for me, but I wasn’t as bad as some of the people that I knew, mainly because I didn’t understand The Game that well. Certainly not as well as some of the athletes I’d been meeting on the Champs scene.
Before the World Juniors, my record read like most boys my age – I was inexperienced. By eighth grade I had a serious girlfriend, but that became stressful after I started messing with another girl. Unsurprisingly, I soon got found out. A boy at a school like William Knibb learns pretty quickly that there’s no hiding place, especially when he’s playing with two girlfriends
at the same time, from the same playground. I found it impossible – I just couldn’t balance having to look after two dates and I got into a lot of trouble. Believe me, a scorned Jamaican female is a stress.
Things changed after the World Juniors. Suddenly I had an angle. Girls wanted to hang with me because I’d been in every single newspaper in the country and I was the local celebrity. I’d also learned The Game better. I picked up tricks from dudes in the Jamaican track and field team. I could watch the way those guys rolled and the style with which they handled their girlfriends. I soon got more ambitious, I discovered how to date tactically, and rather than seeing two girls from the same school, I would meet with dates from different schools. I think the most I had at any one time was three, and when that happened I thought I was The Man.
I didn’t just misbehave with the girls, I was playing around in other ways, too. One time I even tried ganja, which I know sounds like a pretty messed-up admission coming from an Olympic gold medallist, but straight up it was something I did only once, and I regretted it immediately, even though when I lived out in the country, lots of people smoked the stuff.
I’m not making excuses now, and I’m not condoning it, but that’s just the way it was. If ever I played football in the park with friends, there was always a gang of boys smoking spliff, and one day, as a joint got passed around, I became tempted. I figured, ‘You know what? Give me a hit!’ But as soon as I sucked on the rolled-up cigarette, I hated it. The stuff was horrible and I became tired almost from the second I’d drawn in the first lungful.
The rush hit me hard, I felt dizzy. I thought, ‘Forget this!’ And as I sat there, dazed, I could tell that it wasn’t the road for me to go down. First of all because Pops would have stabbed me in the neck if ever he’d caught me fooling around like Bob Marley, and secondly because I could tell the stuff would make me seriously lazy if I smoked it too much. I was already pretty relaxed, but I could see from the people around me that if I smoked a lot of ganja I would become a waster. Instead, I wanted to be motivated, especially when it came to racing, because racing and winning was so much fun.
As a promising athlete, the JAAA flew me around the globe. Not long after the World Junior Champs, I was invited to collect the IAAF Rising Star Award, an accolade given to the most promising kid in track and field. Talk about a tough geography paper, though. I had to travel to Monte Carlo on my own, which was a disaster because, when I came back, I missed my connecting flight from London. Man, I did not have a clue what to do.
First things first – I went to a lady on the nearest check-in desk and asked for help.
‘Oh no, dear,’ she said, when I asked if I could get on another plane. ‘I’m sorry, we can’t give you a seat just yet …’
‘What the hell is going to happen now?’ I thought. Tears came down. The lady saw my face and became all concerned.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘When this happens, the company puts you up in a hotel for the night and we’ll get you on a flight home first thing tomorrow morning. You’ll be fine.’
I felt relieved, but once I’d checked into my room, I could not sleep. I was so worried about missing my plane the next morning that I decided to sit up all night, my bag perched on my lap, as I desperately tried to stay awake. Half an hour before a shuttle bus was due to take me back to the airport, I was checked out and waiting on a bench outside the hotel lobby, shivering in the rain, staring at my watch. I couldn’t wait to get home.
If that happened today, I’d buy myself another ticket. I’d probably find a party; I might even think, ‘To hell with this! London’s a pretty cool city to hang out in, I’ll stay for a couple of days.’ But that day I was freaked. I was a kid, 16 years old, I had no money, and for a while I thought I was going to be stranded in England for ever with the seriously cold weather and weird food.
The world pretty much felt like a massive scary place at that moment. What I didn’t know as I sat there, freezing my ass off, was that it was about to get even bigger.
***
Away from the track I was still a handful, I liked fooling around. Coach McNeil was always vexed at my pranks and he would go wild at me whenever I did something stupid. I wasn’t one for deliberately causing trouble, but my biggest problem was that I wanted to make light of every situation and play jokes, I rarely thought about the consequences of my actions. I would usually do whatever came to mind, often in the heat of the moment, and only when a stunt had gone horribly wrong did I think, ‘Yo, I shouldn’t have done that.’
Like when I jumped out of the school van before the CARIFTA trials in 2002. The air conditioning had stopped working, and it was a hot day, so I decided to take a ride to the stadium in a friend’s wheels rather than travelling with the rest of the kids. Problems kicked up because I hadn’t bothered to tell anyone and I’d sneaked out of the back door when no one was looking. Once Coach had noticed that I’d gone, he panicked and called the cops as soon as he could. Wow, that caused a scene. Once my car arrived at the gates of the arena, the police pulled us over and sat me down on the kerb until Mr McNeil came to get me.
I’d also do anything to get out of running the 400 metres because I hated it so much. It was the training; I hadn’t come to terms with all the hard work, and the background sessions were too tough. I couldn’t face doing it any more, and when I competed in the 2003 World Youth Championships in Sherbrooke, Canada, I wanted to quit the distance. During the 400 metre heats I faked injury in a desperate attempt to miss the semi-final, pulling up as I crossed the finishing line. To make my act seem realistic I clutched the back of my leg as if I’d been shot, but it was no good. The coaches had seen through my stunt and I was later told that the rules stated I had to run the semi-final, whether I liked it or not. If I didn’t run, they would then disqualify me from the 200 metres event, too. I came first in the shorter distance, breaking the championship record.
Despite my fooling around, I took more golds in the CARIFTA GAMES and I won the 200 metres at the Pan American Junior Championships. When I broke the 200 and 400 metres record in Champs, I was flashing on everybody’s radar. Fans were talking me up as the successor to Michael Johnson – and it made sense. At 16, I was making times that he hadn’t touched until the age of 20; one Jamaican politician even called me ‘the most phenomenal sprinter ever produced by the island’. It was pretty clear that I wouldn’t have to worry too hard about my college choices after William Knibb, because quite a few American coaches were coming at me with the promise of a sports scholarship. I realised that, if I wanted, I could have my pick of any US college I wanted.
Mr Peart had managed to get my schoolwork back on track with his lessons, and he became a mentor, though his classes were tough. Well, they had to be, because I was so far behind at William Knibb. Twice a week after school we’d study together, but his hard work paid off and I scored well in five subjects, which was the minimum qualification for college and a sports scholarship.
The way the American college entry system worked was a gift for Jamaican athletes with the right grades. The top stars in junior track and field were approached by universities in the States with the promise of a free or subsidised education based on their ability to compete in track and field. US facilities were as competitive as Jamaican high schools when it came to sport. They wanted to be represented by the world’s best up-and-coming athletes, and because Jamaica didn’t have a similar system, or as a wide choice when it came to higher education, a lot of Caribbean athletes jumped at the chance of moving abroad.
Not me, though. I wanted to stay at home, for the simple reason that I was a mommy’s boy. I couldn’t stand the thought of being away from home too long, even though I’d just turned 17. Mr Peart had first suggested the idea of moving abroad after Champs in 2003 when several US colleges had taken a shine to me and offers came in from all over. He felt going to the States might be a good move, but I knew it wasn’t a sensible career option.
‘Nah, I don’t want to go to the State
s,’ I said.
Mr Peart didn’t get it – he wanted to know why.
‘Well, first of all, it’s too cold there,’ I said. ‘You can get snow and stuff, so forget that. And secondly, if I move to America I’m not going to be able to see Mom.’
Mr Peart stressed that there were a lot of good coaches in the States and that some of the best training facilities in the world could be found there. They would turn me into a global star, he reckoned. But I had issues with that too, because I’d heard the way athletes were treated in America was intense, rough.
Apparently, in those days, when an athlete got a scholarship to one of the big US colleges, they had to do everything the coaches said, because without them they wouldn’t be getting an education in the first place. There was pressure to keep the colleges happy and a lot of the time the sports staff wanted their athletes to work hard. Scholarship kids often ran every weekend because there were championships all the time. Meanwhile, because the Jamaicans were the best youth sprinters around and the colleges wanted to win prizes, they put some heavy pressure on those guys to achieve. I’d heard stories of Jamaican athletes running 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres, 4x100 metres, 4x400 metres and medleys every weekend.
I’d worked out that if I went to America I would have to run the same demanding schedule during both the indoor and outdoor seasons. That seemed crazy to me. My body couldn’t keep up with a campaign like that. I could see myself breaking down and I might not be able to recover. I didn’t want to be another failed contender, one of many top college Jamaican athletes that had left for America at the top of their game, only to return to the Caribbean as broken failures. That was not an option for me.
