Faster than Lightning

by Usain Bolt

  It was the middle of the night and most of the other athletes were asleep, but I was still psychologically pounding the lanes with my biggest rival. Coach already had his talk prepared. Maybe he’d had it planned for a while, I don’t know. It certainly felt that way.

  ‘It’s because you’re slacking off in the gym,’ he said. ‘You think you’re doing the work, but you’re not.’

  I interrupted. ‘Coach, but I am …’

  ‘You are not!’ he said. ‘You’re doing part of the work and, yes, it feels tough, but you need to do it all. Get that fact into headquarters, because you have the speed but you need more strength.’

  He then told me I had to push and work at Spartan more. I needed to get stronger. With more muscle, I could arrive at the straight in a 200 metres race with the strength to lift my knees higher. I’d gather more momentum that way. The difference between myself and Tyson, he explained, was that he had a reserve of power to draw on, but mine had faded away.

  ‘For real, Coach?’

  ‘For real, Usain.’

  In that moment, the future seemed clear and I could feel my competitive streak rising up. I couldn’t stand being beaten by Tyson Gay, by anyone, not when I knew, deep down, that I carried the raw talent to be the best in the world. Sure, getting there was going to be tough and it needed me step up and work harder, but to hell with the pain, I wanted to be the best. I was ready for the effort, even in the damn gym.

  I guess, after all of Coach’s talks, the penny had finally dropped. I wanted to run faster than everybody else, I wanted to be number one. But most of all, I wanted to be a champ in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. I’d found a new motivation to get me through The Moment, and it wasn’t a car for Pops or a fancy watch for me. As my head hit the pillow, I had only one thought on my mind.

  ‘Yo, Tyson Gay: you got lucky.’

  ***

  Here’s a story that proves just how tired I was at the end of 2007. During a late season meet in Zurich, the American 200 metres sprinter Xavier Carter took me with so much hype in a race that it pissed me off big, so big that I don’t think I’ve ever been that upset before or after an event.

  Now, Xavier was a badass with a shady back story he could not shake off, no matter how hard he tried. His charge sheet carried an arrest for the possession of a concealed firearm. He’d picked up the nickname ‘X-Man’ and whenever he ran through the finishing line in first place, Xavier would always make the shape of a cross with his arms, which seemed funny to me at first, though that opinion didn’t last long.

  Zurich took place shortly after the World Championships in Osaka, and I was feeling pretty psyched about the meet; I was ready to go again. Meanwhile, X-Man had missed Osaka because of an injury, so he wasn’t flashing on my radar. I hadn’t expected him to be a threat, but shortly before packing my bags for Switzerland, I received a warning from Wallace Spearmon.

  ‘Yo, Usain, don’t run this 200 metres,’ he said.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Wallace, what?’ I said. ‘You’re joking me.’

  But Wallace was being straight. ‘For real, now. X-Man has been in Zurich for three weeks,’ he said. ‘He’s been training hard, just waiting to beat us. He’s been sending texts and threats saying all kinds of crap about how he’s going to kick my ass, yours too. He means business.’

  Me and Wallace were tight, we had been since a 2006 meet at Crystal Palace, England, when I’d saved him from missing a race start. On that day I remember warming up on the track and looking around to see who was doing what. Wallace was an athlete that liked to be on the track early for his stride-outs and practice starts, but on that one occasion he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Where is that guy?’ I thought. ‘I know Wallace is around – he should be out here warming up.’

  After 20 minutes or so of stretching I started to get a little concerned.

  ‘Nah, something’s wrong. He should be here.’

  I picked up my kit and walked over to the sidelines. To my surprise, I saw Wallace stretched out on a bench. He had his cap pulled down over his face and he was sleeping away. I jogged over and started slapping him around the head.

  ‘Yo, Wallace, what are you doing?’ I shouted. ‘You gotta get up!’

  He jumped off his bench. ‘What?! What’s going on?’ he mumbled, looking seriously sleepy.

  ‘It’s time to warm up!’ I shouted. ‘Come on, man, I’m already set to go.’

  I knew I’d probably saved Wallace from an embarrassing showing on the track. Without a proper warm-up, it’s unlikely he would have covered himself in glory that night, and after my gesture we were cool together, probably because Tyson won that day while Wallace came in third and I was fourth. But this time the tables had been turned. By tipping me off about X-Man, Wallace had given me a wake-up call of his own. My biggest problem was that I wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

  ‘Nah, I’m a’ight,’ I said, as he stressed to me how pumped X-Man was. ‘I feel good, I’m in great shape …’

  Wallace wasn’t convinced. ‘I’m not going to run, man. I just know something’s up. He’s been waiting since Osaka. You sure you want to go, dawg? You sure you’re not tired?’

  I told him, ‘Yo, I am not tired.’

  ‘You’re tired,’ he said. ‘You just don’t feel it, the way your body’s drained.’

  I wasn’t going to listen to him; X-Man didn’t faze me. Sure, he had beaten me earlier in the season with a ridiculous time of 19.63 seconds, the second quickest ever 200 metres at that time, but I was ready and raring to go for Switzerland, right up until the moment I’d settled on the start line. Shortly after the gun went Bang! Wallace’s words came back to haunt me. At first my drive phase was good, but when I started swinging and the metres passed – 40, 50, 60 – my body died on the track. After 70 I had nothing left, all my energy had gone. Then I looked across and saw X-Man running out of the corner. He was taking the lead.

  ‘Ah, crap,’ I thought. ‘I’m going to lose this race. Wallace was right.’

  I settled myself, knowing I could still take second place without too much stress.

  ‘Whatever, though,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m just chillin’, I’m running home …’

  Then the worst thing happened. X-Man crossed the line in first place, he was seriously charged up, and to prove it he showed the crowd his trademark celebration, making the ‘X’ with his arms as he jogged around the back stretch. That got me riled.

  ‘Seriously? You don’t come to the World Champs and that’s what you’re going to do?’ I thought. ‘You’re gonna “X” me? Oh, you’re kidding.’

  I was so upset, and when I saw Wallace shortly afterwards he was laughing hard.

  ‘I told you not to run!’ he said. ‘I warned you.’

  I was still furious. ‘Yo, next race you see me and X-Man running together?’ I said. ‘Do not come onto that start line.’

  ‘What?!’ said Wallace.

  ‘Seriously now,’ I said, determined. ‘Do not come into that race. It’s going to be payback time.’

  I meant it too, but Xavier had given me a lesson every bit as valuable as the ones handed out by Coach: I had to understand my body better. I had to learn when I was tired. Without that knowledge, I could forget ever becoming a major force in track and field.

  * The Golden League was replaced by the Diamond League in 2010. The Golden League held events in Zurich, Brussels, Oslo, Rome, Paris and Berlin.

  ‘You should try running another distance.’ Coach made it sound like I had a say in the matter, but we both knew it was an instruction. Despite my loss to X-Man in Zurich, I’d become physically stronger throughout the season and my back had responded to the new exercises and the treatments from The Doc in Munich. I had a new masseur called Eddie, who warmed my body before every training session and all my competitive races. But there was a feeling my form in the 200 could be improved by some extra training. Working on another distance would increase my strength and speed stam
ina; it might add to my power on the corner and improve my finishes at the tape.

  ‘Yo, nice idea, Coach,’ I said, when it was first mentioned midway through ’07. ‘I like it.’

  Then he gave me the stupid news.

  ‘Usain, I think you should take up the 400 metres again, just like you did in high school.’

  ‘What? The 400 metres? Forget that!’

  To me, that race was just plain bad news. The 400 metres meant pain, lots and lots of pain. I thought back to the training runs at William Knibb under Coach McNeil and felt sick. I’d seen how hard the pros ran in the 400. It looked like the race from hell to me. I knew that The Moment of No Return would break me up really bad.

  ‘Nah, Coach,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘Let’s do the 100 metres instead.’*

  Coach pulled a face – he thought I was talking crazy. In his mind the shorter distance was a harder race to execute because it was so damn technical. Bang! Once the starter’s gun had blown, everything had to go smoothly and one little mistake could screw a race. Bad start – forget it. Technique goes off during the drive phase – forget it. Lose your head in the closing stages – forget it.

  In the 200 metres I could make a mistake, a shaky step maybe, or a slow start, and recover on the corner. There was more time and distance to readjust. But the 100 was a different game altogether. There was so much that could go wrong and so little time to straighten out any technical errors. Everything had to be just perfect, from the first movement to the final reach at the tape.

  Coach also worried that the explosive bursts needed to perfect the shorter race might bring added strain to my back and legs. If that wasn’t enough, he then argued it would take me for ever to unravel myself out of the blocks. A few years previously my high-school coaches had told me I was too tall for the 100 metres. Now Coach was laying out the same story.

  My height made me way too tall for the 100. It was a fair point. I was much bigger than Tyson, who was five foot ten. That height meant that he was short enough to get out of the blocks in a heartbeat, but he was tall enough to move down the track at a serious pace. It was that combination which had enabled him to be a contender in both the 100 and 200 metres.

  Coach’s point was that the start was the first challenge in any short race. When the gun cracked, a sprinter unfolded their body out of the crouching position as quickly as possible; a taller guy was at a disadvantage because it took longer – it was simple physics really. In real time that action might seem like one hundredth of a second, a pulse, a blink, but it was often enough to separate someone like me from a shorter dude like Tyson, or Asafa. In race time that blink was the difference between a champ and an also-ran.

  Coach had done all the maths. He also estimated it was harder for a taller guy like myself to make a quick stride pattern on the track because my legs were too long. A man of six foot five couldn’t turn his legs over quickly enough to move down the track at pace, he said. Not in theory, anyway. But even though there were a lot of physical realities stacked against me, I kept pushing.

  ‘Oh, come on, Coach,’ I said, almost begging. ‘One chance, that’s all I want. Enter me into a meet. If I run a bad 100, I’ll run the 400 metres next season. But if I run good, say 10.30 seconds or better, then I’ll do the 100 metres.’

  Coach reluctantly agreed. Part of his development strategy involved challenging racers with reachable targets, because it gave them extra motivation in training and it forced them to work tougher, especially if there was a reward at the end of their grind. Once their target had been met, Coach set another one. And then another. It was like a farmer leading his donkey along with a carrot.

  My introduction to the 100 metres worked pretty much on the same principle. Coach told me that my first goal was to break the national record in the 200 metres, which stood at 19.86. If I managed that, he would then allow me an attempt at the 100. A small race in Rethymno, Crete, that July would be the location for my ‘trial’, and a time of 10.30 seconds or better meant that I could avoid the 400 metres and instead focus on the shorter distance. The carrot had been dangled. But if I crashed out and ran slow, then I could look forward to a season of serious pain.

  I was hyped, and I stepped up. In the 2007 Jamaican Championships I reached Coach’s first target by breaking Don Quarrie’s 36-year-old national record in the 200 with a time of 19.75 seconds. When Rethymno came around, about a month before the World Champs in Osaka, I faced up to my death or glory 100 metres race, like a man with a serious reward on his mind.

  ‘Come on, man,’ I thought as I walked to the start line. ‘You cannot be at the back of the pack, not today. You’re gonna die in the 400 metres …’

  Crack! The gun fired and I was off in a heartbeat, burning down the track. I didn’t have time to think about what was happening, I just ran as hard as I could, my legs swinging, the arms pumping fast. I forgot about my height and the disadvantages of my long legs. Instead the image of Coach staring at his stopwatch as I ran 700-metre training laps forced me on. When I glanced across the line, I realised I was in first place.

  ‘What the hell?’ I thought. ‘I’m gonna win!’

  The race was done in a heartbeat. I glanced up at the clock, hoping, praying for a decent time. It said: ‘1/BOLT: 10.03 seconds.’

  Ten-point-oh-three?!

  My ass was safe. I’d won with a time so quick that I knew I would never have to have to run the 400 metres again. Relief and happiness hit me at the same moment – my time felt like a lucky escape from a miserable, punishing prison sentence. Coach seemed pretty excited, too. The speed had blown him away.

  ‘I never believed that you could run ten-oh,’ he said, smiling. ‘I thought you might run ten-one, ten-two, but not that …’

  I had got the job done.

  ‘Yo, we had a deal, right?’ I said.

  Coach nodded, neither of us knowing that our bet had settled sporting history.

  ***

  Every now and then an athlete can sense something special might happen. It’s not a feeling of destiny, or a sense of inevitability, more an idea that all the hard work is paying off. In 2008, everything came together, I felt deadly. I wanted to kill people with my season.

  As background training got under way in October ’07, I did all the weights Coach asked me to do, I did all the back exercises on the schedule. Hell, I even went to the gym when I was told. My focus was Beijing and nothing was going to get in my way.

  ‘A’ight, Coach,’ I said when we first got to work. ‘Anything you tell me to do in training, I’m gonna do it. If you want me to do ten 300-metre laps, I’m gonna do them. I’m not going to even argue.’

  At first Coach didn’t believe me. He figured I would mess him around, like I always did. He probably expected me to skip gym in the mornings. In previous years I had grumbled, or tried to cut him down by a lap or two whenever there was a time training session at the track. But to his surprise, I executed every time – I showed the same work ethic Dad had lived by during his working life in Coxeath and I pushed myself hard. If Coach set me nine laps an evening, I ran nine. If he told me to run faster, I ran faster. It was tough and it hurt, but every time The Moment of No Return pinched at my muscles I remembered the new focus, my new ambition: ‘Yo, this is an Olympics season. This can make me. I need this.’

  I was on point and, whenever a championship or meet approached, I became the immaculate athlete. I cut out most of the junk food and I switched off my personal messenger and phone, especially on Saturday nights. I needed to relax in peace without any distractions from friends who wanted to party. I was a role model pro all of a sudden.

  The results arrived almost immediately. My physique was tight. I worked hard in the gym and my arms were solid blocks; my abs developed sharp edges; my calves and thighs were ripped. I had power, and I looked so bad that whenever I checked myself in the mirror I’d think, ‘Wow, Usain, looking pretty damn good.’ Everything rippled.

  My speed was increasing, too. In the New Ye
ar I got word that Daniel Bailey, the 100 and 200 metres sprinter from Antigua and Barbuda, was coming down to the track for training. That got me excited because it meant I had a new competition, somebody to test myself against on a daily basis. Daniel was a hot starter, he was a beast when it came to popping the blocks, and our sessions quickly became an intense challenge where both athletes hated to lose.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! For the first few weeks, Daniel’s powerful starts meant he was always ahead of me at the beginning of our races. The first time I accelerated past him over 40 metres, I knew it was a big deal. Then it happened again, and again. I was killing it, I’d found a new gear with the work I’d been doing with Coach. I was hitting some serious speeds and Daniel couldn’t live with me, even with his explosive starts.

  Sometimes I worked too hard, though. There were evenings when my energy just smoked away, but if the fatigue became too big, I’d beg Coach for a day off. Twenty-four hours of recuperation was usually enough to set me straight because I was strong – seriously strong. I knew my physique would provide the rocket fuel to fire me off the corner and past Tyson, Wallace and anyone else in the 200 metres. I was getting quicker in the 100, too.

  My graduation from the third term in Coach’s three-year plan had been successful and injury-free. Like the man had predicted in our first meeting together, I was ready for my Olympic year.

  ***

  Coach pushed me forward in both the 100 and 200 metres, and I lined up in all the big meets against all the top competitors.

  If I had questions about his tactics, I decided to keep them to myself at the time because I was a young guy, 21 years of age, and I couldn’t tell him what to do. So every race I could run in, I was there at the start line, popping the blocks alongside the likes of Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell. But I didn’t mind because I was winning in both distances, especially in the 100 where my times were blowing people’s minds, mine included.

  The first meet of the 2008 season was at Spanish Town, and to prove the 100 in Crete hadn’t been a one-off, I clocked another time of 10.03 seconds. After the race, Coach and me kicked back at the track and threw some numbers around. The times we believed I might run in the 100 metres (on a really good day) were 9.87 seconds, possibly 9.86, but it would probably take me a while to get there. Neither of us thought that I had the physique to go any faster. But then, in May, Kingston happened.