Faster than Lightning

by Usain Bolt

  One time when I was little, a thorn in my foot had turned septic, which was really bad, dangerous even. Mom could see I was in pain, so gently, carefully, the way a parent does, she tried to draw out the wood with a pin and some tweezers.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said as the tears came down.

  ‘No, Mom, it hurts,’ I wailed, loudly.

  Then along came Pops. It was 9.30 at night and he was sleeping in the room next door after a day working hard at the coffee factories. My grumbling must have woken him up because he came into the bedroom, ordering me to lift my injured foot. Pops then grabbed my ankle and dug in with the pin. I wasn’t able to pull away from his grip, he was too strong, and the thorn was soon yanked from the flesh as I screamed in pain. When I got older, I teased him about it all the time.

  ‘Yo, you were evil, man,’ I told him.

  But my Spanish Town nurse was just as brutal. The prickles were pushed deeper and deeper into the skin and there was blood everywhere. Nothing was working. In the end, her plan was abandoned and a senior doctor was called to fix the mess. He took one look at my lacerated soles and explained that I’d need minor surgery to remove the spikes before they could turn poisonous. It would be painful, he said, but I had two options when it came to numbing the sensation.

  ‘Either we can stick you in the spine and kill the pain from the waist down …’

  ‘Hell no,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’m not gonna let you do that.’

  ‘Or, we can numb the area around your foot.’

  I figured that to be the most sensible choice under the circumstances, but it quickly turned out to be a huge mistake. The needle, when it arrived, was about eight inches long. The doctor slipped the point into the thin, tender skin around the middle of my shin and as it pricked the flesh and probed slowly, I could see the steel of the needle moving across the bone towards the top of my foot. It was like an awful torture scene from some horror movie. I started screaming as a sharp, blinding pain shot through my body.

  ‘Oh God, be tough,’ I thought, gritting my teeth and gripping the rails on the bed. ‘Be tough …’

  The doctor administered the anaesthetic, but the agony wasn’t over. Another part of my foot needed to be numbed, but rather than completely removing the syringe from my shinbone, he withdrew the slicing needle to its point and moved the angle of attack by 45 degrees. The spine slalomed across my bone for a second time and, as the pain hit me, all sorts of colours flashed before my eyes. I wanted to vomit.

  ‘No, forget this,’ I shouted. ‘Just stick me in the spine.’

  Minutes later, the spike in my back had knocked me out, I was unconscious, and when I woke up I felt dead from the waist down. My feet, legs and torso were paralysed. That was a sensation I’d never experienced before, and it shook me up.

  The doctor warned me it would take around 12 hours for any feeling to return to the lower half of my body, and that moment couldn’t come quick enough because not being able to feel my dick was the strangest experience in the world. I kept staring at my watch, pinching my legs and hoping for some life to return. Time seemed to drag. I felt some tingling in my toes and some sensitivity in my feet and my calves, but there was nothing else.

  Oh crap, nothing in my dick.

  My knees were good, my thighs, too.

  Please, God, there’s nothing in my dick. Nothing …

  My hips.

  What the hell is going on with my dick?

  When a flash of feeling finally came around, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Forget the car crash – a numb crotch was probably the most stressful situation I’d experienced in my entire life.

  ***

  When Coach first flipped on the news and saw the images of my wrecked car, he figured I had to be dead. He went crazy. ‘There’s no way anyone could be lucky enough to walk away from a car that messed up,’ he said, after NJ had called to tell him that I was actually OK. Coach wouldn’t believe anyone who told him otherwise. It must have given him the rush of his life to see me walking around afterwards, with only a few inches of dressing on my feet to show for the horrific accident. He and I both knew I’d nearly been lost for good.

  All of a sudden, the crash had changed my way of thinking. I understood that God had saved me, that He had a plan for me. When I was a kid, the fact that I was bigger, stronger and much, much faster than anybody else was taken for granted. Not now. I understood that something special had been handed down to me and I got a Bible to take on my travels. My Aunt Rose, my dad’s sister, started sending me a verse by text every day, which I then wrote down so I could remember the words.

  All of a sudden I felt safe in the knowledge that there was somebody looking out for my well-being. Not long afterwards, I got on to a plane to Miami. The flight was choppy and as we bounced around in a pocket of turbulence, everybody freaked out around me. I was cool, though. I pushed my seat back, closed my eyes and relaxed.

  ‘Nah, I’m not going to die in a plane crash – not yet,’ I thought. ‘I still have a little bit more running to do …’

  I became more appreciative. I understood what I’d been given all of a sudden and I wanted to make the most of it. I wanted to run even faster. I also took to chatting to the other athletes at Racers. It was my turn to teach and I gave out advice to the younger kids about their racing techniques and running styles. I wanted to pass on what I’d learned about track and field, because I felt that if I could give them as much help as possible, then it might change their lives for ever, without them even knowing.

  One day, as I worked my way back to fitness on the track, I watched some of the younger athletes running the 4x100 metres. During their warm-up sessions, one dude was jogging slowly, stretching and flexing his muscles as he moved around the curve. Every now and then, though, he’d explode into a hard sprint. It was an amateur’s move, and a risky one at that, so I stopped him dead in his tracks.

  ‘Yo, don’t do that,’ I said. ‘If you use that style you’ll put your hamstring into shock and it’ll pop.’

  He nodded and got himself back into a normal running rhythm. It might not have seemed like a big deal to him at the time, but I figured that if that one kid avoided serious injury and got his chance to win a championship that season, then I’d done my bit. It was the beginning of a new world-view for me.

  That I was alive was miraculous, that I could walk was luckier still, and the only physical issues I had to negotiate in the weeks after my crash were my injured feet, which I knew would take a few weeks to heal. That was good news, because 2009 was a big year for me and the World Championships in Berlin were coming up fast. All the talk of Tyson Gay’s absence at the Olympic finals had fired me up during the off season, and I wanted to prove to everybody that I was the best runner on the planet. As I rested, I became focused again, as I knew Tyson would be.

  Then the guy made a miscalculation. He told the media that my world record was within his reach, and that he was going to take it. When I first heard the quotes, as I recovered from my injuries and built on my background training, I couldn’t get my head around it. If another runner was coming for my time, why would he announce it to the world all of a sudden? Tyson now had to deliver the fastest 100 metres time ever, otherwise he was going to look pretty foolish. He had heaped a whole load of pressure on himself.

  That news was a help to me, as the information enabled me to figure out my opponent’s mental tactics. If track and field was a psychological game of poker in the build-up to a major champs, then Tyson had overplayed his hand, big-style. That one soundbite made me realise he hadn’t spotted my inner strength. He hadn’t analysed how I was and how my brain worked during the build-up to a major race. Sure, Tyson might have understood my physical prowess. But he should have realised that big talk, from any rival, always inspired me to work harder. It brought out the competitor in me. Everyone in Racers knew that talking crap was a big mistake because it forced me to step up.

  I guess we were poles apart in attitude. Hu
ge statements weren’t my thing, no matter how confident I was feeling about going into the World Championships. Coach and experience had both taught me that anything could happen in a race to throw me off course. Once I’d stepped on to the track and the gun had gone Pow! I was at the mercy of so many different random factors, each one capable of derailing my world record attempt. I might make a bad step or pull a hamstring, or I might trip and fall at the tape. So much could go wrong to stop me from living up to my own hype. Afterwards, it was a different matter, though. If I wanted, I could claim that I knew a world record was there for the taking. Nobody would be able to say any different – who could prove it? Not Tyson, not anybody. So I left my talking to the post-race interviews and press conferences.

  At first, Coach’s training sessions were tough work. Because of the injuries to my feet, I started my World Championships challenge at a disadvantage; I was behind on my background training schedule and unable to pick up the pace for a while. Every time I ran, the cuts in my foot burned. I used shoes with protective foam to guard the sliced flesh on my toes and instep, and that relieved the pain a little, but running on the turn was impossible. Every time I trained on the corner, my wounds were shredded.

  Coach watched as I worked through the pain, his face rarely registering any concern, despite my struggles. That was an unreadable look I’d come to recognise as an athlete. Yeah, I knew he felt sorry about my troubles, for sure. But trainers often assessed their racers the way a horse owner assessed the prize beasts in a yard. From the side of the track, Coach was no different and he studied my muscles like they were the tools of his trade. As I powered around the University of West Indies lanes at top speed, he judged my form and strength. My potential for victory was being reviewed with every session.

  Then the man revealed his master plan for Berlin.

  ‘A’ight, Usain, this is how it works,’ he said, one night after training. ‘You need to give me six weeks of intensive work if you want to beat Tyson in the World Champs. Relax on the partying and cut out the junk food. Let me take care of the rest.’

  On the track, my schedule was adjusted. We cut back on the background work and focused on explosive speed training. Off it, I became a role-model athlete again. I turned off my phone and messenger for six whole weeks, I cut out the junk food and late nights. Before long, I was running the 100 metres in 9.70 seconds without stressing. I was also killing it on the curve in the 200. Once again, Coach had figured out a way of getting me physically ready, despite the time I’d lost to the crash.

  If my form was anything to go by, Tyson had some serious worry. I was primed.

  ***

  Berlin was huge. If the Olympics was considered to be the track and field equivalent of the FIFA World Cup, then the World Championships was more like the Africa Cup of Nations, the European Champs or the Copa América. The hype was always big, the fans got really excited and the best athletes on the planet arrived with their A-game.

  To me, Europe was a beautiful part of the world in which to race: Zurich, Rome and Lausanne always gave me a lot of love whenever I showed up for Diamond League events, but Berlin, when I arrived, was on another level. The venue was the impressive Olympiastadion, a huge arena that held 74,000 people. The field was ringed by a bright blue track, its bleachers were ram-packed nearly every day, and when the athletes took off on the gun the noise got wild.

  But the World Championships felt like just another race to me. I was relaxed, I felt strong. My back was in check thanks to all the physiotherapy and gym work, not to mention Dr Müller-Wohlfahrt’s treatment, and as a result the muscles in my back were tough. My hamstrings were full of strength. There was nothing for me to stress about. I cruised through the heats in both the 100 and 200, and by the time I’d hit the warm-up track before the 100 metres final I was beyond hyped.

  I was so relaxed that an hour before the race, as Eddie stretched my muscles on his massage table, I started fooling around, just like I had done in Beijing.

  ‘Yo, who wants to bet how fast I’m going to run?’

  Everybody laughed.

  Yeah, OK, let’s do this.

  We all guessed times: Ricky took 9.52 seconds, Eddie 9.59 seconds; I went for 9.54.

  I guess there was a confidence to my game, not just because I was fit, but also because the 100 metres final had brought together the best of the best. Tyson was in there, Asafa too. All of us were running at 100 per cent and I knew that if I could take first place, nobody would ever be able to cast doubt on my position as the best sprinter on the planet; nobody could make excuses for the other athletes.

  Mentally, rather than crushing me, like it did some athletes, that realisation fired me up. It gave me reason to be happy because I knew I always thrived on the biggest challenges. Tyson must have freaked when he saw me walking through the call area to the start line. Despite the scale of the competition, I was chilled. I even started joking with the Antigua and Barbuda runner Daniel Bailey. The pair of us were laughing and pulling dance moves. We had competed together in every heat of the World Championships so far, and along the way we’d become wrapped up in a running joke about who could get the fastest start with each gun.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! After every race we checked the replay to see who had left their blocks the quickest. But what had started as a bit of fun was threatening to derail one of us, because in the semis I had false-started. I’d been so eager to get ahead of him that I moved too fast and the athletes were called back for a restart.

  In those days, the rules for runners and false starts were pretty clear. Any athlete who moved within 0.10 seconds of the gun was deemed to have false-started. That time was based on the fact that scientists had reckoned that any human judgement made at that speed was based on guesswork rather than reaction. It was impossible for the brain to move to a noise that quickly. After the first false start, the athletes received a warning. If somebody false-started on the next gun, they were immediately disqualified.

  That rule was open to some serious manipulation, though. It was figured that some of the American athletes were deliberately false-starting to throw the other guys off their concentration. It was a trick used by seasoned pros, especially those guys who tended to be slow starters.

  Let me explain: if there was a line of 100 metres athletes in a race and one guy knew he was going to false-start, that placed him in the strongest position, psychologically. The restart didn’t come as a shock to him; it was in his head all along. Once the race was reset, the other guys had worry all of a sudden, because if someone jumped the gun again, they were immediately disqualified. A race official would walk to their lane to flash a red card. That meant the faster starters in the pack had to chill. They had to move a little slower on the Bang! just in case. The slower starters in the pack were competing on a more level playing field.

  I didn’t want to lose a race to disqualification, not when my number one status was up for grabs. I took Bailey to one side.

  ‘Yo, please let’s forget this starter thing,’ I said. ‘I just want to execute. When we start putting pressure on each other, we always do dumb stuff …’

  He nodded. Bailey understood me more than most runners – we had become friends since he had started training at the Racers camp, and he knew that I liked to fool around before a race. It helped me to relax. He also knew the stakes were a little higher for me that night, but that still didn’t stop us from dancing around, busting out some dancehall moves. I looked across the lanes and smiled. Tyson’s face was a picture of intense concentration. He had to be thinking, ‘What’s wrong with these dudes? This is a World Championships final, and they’re playing and joking?’

  When the athletes were called to the line … Bam! I caught a hot start and my early strides were smooth. I pulled away in no time at all, and as I got to 50 metres I glanced sideways to check on my opponents, but I knew it was a precautionary peek. I had executed the perfect start. There was no way anyone else in the pack was going to catch me.

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p; I looked again, just to make sure.

  ‘Nah,’ I thought. ‘I’ve got this.’

  The race was won, and with 20 metres to go I looked for the clock. The seconds were ticking over, almost in slow motion, and in a heartbeat I could see that the world record was within reach. The funny thing was, I felt calm. There was no feeling of shock or surprise as there had been when I’d broken the time in New York and Beijing. Instead I maintained my cool and shot through the line.

  The roar of the crowd told me everything I needed to know: 9.58 seconds. A new world record. I was number one for everyone in the world to see, and I raced around the bright blue track in the Olympiastadion, my arms spread wide. I pulled the lightning bolt pose and sent the crowd wild; somebody threw a Jamaica flag around my shoulders. It was becoming a familiar experience.

  Later I heard that Tyson was pissed – seriously pissed. People had caught him cussing afterwards, getting angry and flashing his hand. In his mind he’d really thought there was a chance of him beating me, but I’d known from the minute we had arrived at the track that I was in better shape – mentally at least. Tyson was wound up too tight, whereas I hadn’t been fazed at all. My only worry was whether I was going to win the 100 euro bet with Eddie and Ricky. Meanwhile, Tyson was thinking about titles and world records, both of which were heavy pressures. Had he lightened up a little bit, he would have run a better race; less stress would have made him more relaxed and allowed him to execute.

  The following day, I got word that Tyson had withdrawn from the 200 metres. Rumours flew around that he’d decided not to face me again, that the thought of being beaten was too much for him. The truth was that he’d damaged his groin and was unable to compete, but I wasn’t too concerned because I’d already shown that I could take him in a major final. The fact he hadn’t competed in Beijing was forgotten as far as I was concerned.

  Looking back, my thinking was so very different from ’08, especially in the 200. In Beijing, I’d been initially unsure about how quick I was going to run and whether I could beat Michael Johnson’s time. But in Berlin, when it came to the 200 metres final a couple of nights later, I was pretty confident I could improve on my own record. My time in the 100 had confirmed that belief, and once the gun fired I chased hard.