Faster than Lightning

by Usain Bolt

  What?!

  The race chat had started; I cussed myself.

  ‘Bolt! What the hell was that start? That was horrible. What’s wrong with you?’

  The rest of the field had burned down the track ahead of me, but I knew I had to concentrate on my own strides rather than anyone else’s. Despite my stupid start, gold was still in reach.

  Relax … Relax … Calm down …

  I focused on my technique again, my drive phase had been good and after another second had passed, I glanced across the pack. The race had evened out. I could see a line of people. Everybody was equal.

  Alright, we’re all together, nobody’s pulling away. It’s over now …

  My long strides pushed me past the other athletes; I was like a sports car moving into top gear. I passed the 60-metre mark, then 65. I was hitting high speed as everyone else fell off behind me. The 2012 Olympics final was proving to be a competition of simple math, like so many others: the world’s best and their 45 steps battling it out with my 41.

  Before the race started, my only focus had been to come in as the Number One athlete. Making a killer time hadn’t even been an issue in my mind. Once I knew the gold was mine, I remember thinking, Yo, you got this! Which in hindsight was just about the worst thing that could have happened because the realisation allowed me to switch off. I relaxed. I slowed down. Then something went off in my head like a fire alarm.

  S**t! The world record! Bolt, the world record!

  Damn! I had put my foot up too early, I had chilled, and as the awful realisation that I might have missed the shot at a landmark time dawned on me, I began digging towards the line. I dived for the finish, hoping to shave a couple of hundredths of a second from my speed, but I stooped too early and my rhythm collapsed. It was a clumsy move and straightaway I knew I’d blown it.

  I looked up at the clock.

  Usain Bolt: first place.

  9.63 seconds – the fastest Olympic 100 ever.

  I had missed out on my own world record because of a lapse in concentration.

  Racing momentum is funny thing. A sprinter has to run straight through a 100 metres race if he wants to win big; he can’t slow in the middle and then try to over-stride or speed up at the end. If he or she does that, they’re going to lose time because their momentum breaks. I had made that mistake and reached for the finish too early. Had I not chilled with 20 or so metres to go I might have made a crazy time, like 9.52 seconds. Instead I judged my dip all wrong and fell short.

  As I ran around the corner, there was the usual chaos afterwards – photos, hugs, a pose for the fans, but Coach was not happy. When I left the track, I heard him calling over to me. After the 2009 World Championships, I’d learned not to ask for his opinion whenever I’d won a gold medal, but it was clear the man was going to give it to me this time, whether I liked it or not.

  ‘Amateur!’ he said, walking my way. He was tutting, shaking his head.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Bolt, you’re an amateur,’ he repeated – like I hadn’t heard him.

  ‘What?! Why? I just won gold!’

  ‘Well, yes you did, but you robbed yourself of the possibility of breaking the world record by half a stride. You dropped more than that in time by diving for the line from so far out and you lost momentum. It is not what I expect of someone of your professionalism. That’s why I say, it was an amateur dive.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So, OK, Coach, how fast do you think I could have gone then?’

  ‘Potential is an abstract thing … And it’s guessing. What I would say is that you’re currently capable of running faster than you’ve ever run before. As for the limits it’s not for me to guess. I tend not to look beyond the here and now …’

  ‘Yo, Coach: how fast?’

  ‘You should be running 9.52 by now. You were in the shape to run that today, but you joked around too much on the line. If you’d been serious, you might have even made a time of 9.49.’

  Since those early shock results in the 100 metres, and my world records during 2008 and 2009, Coach had never been wrong about my times. He had judged pretty accurately what I would achieve, based on my form and fitness. His latest prediction had blown my mind.

  ***

  If the 200 was my race, then I was going to defend the Olympic title with everything I had. Especially from Blake.

  I came off that corner like a slingshot. After 80 metres I hit top speed and was leading the line. My heart was pounding hard; I could feel a rush, a beautiful sense of freedom that comes with a smooth race. It was ridiculous fun. I peeked across the pack as I came into the straight but I’d passed everyone. There was danger, though. I could see that Blake had made a charge out of the corner of my eye, so I hit the track hard. Harder.

  My lead was growing, but I knew I had to stay focused. I couldn’t relax. A lot of times in a 200 metres race, when a runner hits the 180-metre mark his speed naturally slows down. It’s impossible for him to keep his maximum pace going for the full distance and the final stretch is a dangerous time for any sprinter because an opponent can come through and steal first place on the line.

  Not this time. Blake didn’t have enough to catch me. With 70 metres to go I knew I’d won another gold; I just had to keep my stride right and maintain a steady rhythm. As I approached the final 10 metres, I put the brakes on and slowed to a jog because I wanted to leave my mark. The race was won for sure, so I glanced over at Blake. He was right behind me. I caught his eye and slowly put a finger to my lips.

  Ssshhhhh!

  It was a message. It said, ‘Yo, don’t ever disrespect me again.’ And the look on his face told me he’d understood.

  I pounded my chest and pointed to the crowd, shouting, screaming, ‘I did it!’ I dropped to the floor and did five push-ups – one for every Olympic gold medal I’d won so far. I’d proved my point: the 200 was my event, nobody else’s.

  I had shown everybody that I was still Number One, despite the doubts and the talk that had taken place following the Olympic trials. As I got to my feet and jogged around the stadium, a Jamaican flag wrapped around my shoulders, I felt a hand grab at me. It was Blake and despite my statement, it was time to forget. I gave him a hug because I had no beef with him. It was done.

  In that moment, I didn’t say anything more to him about our situation. We did our victory lap together and I was happy for him – he had taken silver. There was really no need to mention the Jamaican trials again. I didn’t have to say, ‘Hey, you were wrong for disrespecting me out there’, because a) I didn’t want him to lose focus for the 4x100 relay final later on in the championships and b) I didn’t want a bad vibe around the village for the rest of the Olympics.

  Like Pops had taught me as a kid when he’d dished out the whoop-ass: always show good manners. And if a situation’s ever going to get heated, then forget it – it usually means there’s nothing more to discuss. I was over it. Life was cool again.

  ***

  Finally I could call myself a sporting legend.

  I know that sounds cocky, but it was true. By winning gold in the 100 and 200 metres Olympic finals for the second time, I had proved that I was The Real Deal. Winning three gold medals in Beijing wasn’t quite enough to make me one of the greatest sportsmen ever, but doing it twice was something to shout about.

  It was huge. It set me apart from so many other athletes and nobody could dispute my status, not after London. I had achieved so much in track and field. I’d proven to the world that I was the best at what I did and I was the top draw wherever I raced. That had allowed me to give so much back to the sport. For the past few years, whenever I’d showed up at a meet, tickets had sold out; I could stack a stadium on my own and all eyes were on me when I arrived at the start line. If I competed in Europe, every stand in the arena was full. Without me, some of those seats would have been empty.

  It was the same in London. When tickets were released for the 100 and 200 metres finals, they sold out in a crazy
time. People in England without seats stressed because they wouldn’t get to see me in the flesh. In 2008, three billion people watched me break the 100 metres world record on the TV; billions of people watched the Olympics all over the world in 2012. Those figures had brought a lot of money to the sport in sponsorship and commercial deals. I’d set the standards high.

  After my lap of honour, I sat in the media conference and laid it down to everyone.

  ‘I am a living legend,’ I said. ‘Bask in my glory.’

  Everybody laughed. Nobody bothered to challenge me. Well how could they? It was true.

  ***

  Nobody but Coach.

  If he had been vexed by my performance in the 100, then he was even quicker to point out the fact that my 200 victory had come at a price. By crossing the line that way, by silencing Blake, I’d passed up a chance of taking the world record again. I’d slowed down when I should have made a dive for the line. Coach later told me that I’d been running fast enough to break my time of 19.19 seconds easily.

  ‘Amateur,’ he said, again. ‘Amateur!’

  This time I didn’t care so much. I had made my point, so I shrugged it off. The world was hyped about my achievements and, as I’d experienced in Beijing, it wanted a piece of me once more. Nearly all of the attention was good, but as is always the way in track and field, there was a little bit of bad to go with it – the topic of doping reared its head again.

  As in ’08 there were questions from the media after my 100 metres gold, but I understood why one or two people were raising their eyebrows at my achievements. It had been pretty incredible after all and the odd doubter was something I’d got used to. Besides, I knew the accusations were crap, so like Beijing I had no issue with answering drug-related enquiries. But then a reporter asked me if I knew who Carl Lewis was.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I explained that I’d heard he was a former American athlete, but that was it, I wasn’t really sure. I guess one of the weirdest things about me and track and field was that I didn’t really know its history, certainly not as far back as the 80s, when Lewis was racing.

  Then the journalist told me he had been making noises about my achievements.* It was the same old argument that Jamaican athletes weren’t tested as vigorously as those in other countries. But the impact of a man called Carl Lewis saying something about Jamaican athletics didn’t really register at first. I had no real idea who he was, or the full events of his life. My interest in the 100, 200 and track and field began with Michael Johnson and Maurice Greene. I didn’t think any more about the name until I chilled in the village the next day and somebody told me to Google his career.

  When I flipped open my laptop, checked out his story and realised he had won nine Olympic gold medals in the ’80s and ’90s including a few in my events, the 100 and 200, I got angry that he was saying so much crap about me. Then I got mad with the newspaper guys who were repeating his words – they knew what he was saying was untrue. In my mind, athletics, WADA, JADCO and the IAAF had been trying to move on.

  Here are the facts: during the season, the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission carried out tests up to five times a day for 40 weeks. There were also unannounced tests for all Jamaican athletes. The country signed the Copenhagen Declaration on Anti-Doping in Sport in 2003 and we worked with the rules set out by WADA. The JAAA followed the same laws as everyone else.

  Everyone was getting tested and when people cheated, they got caught. To me, that meant the authorities were doing a good job and the few athletes that had strayed off the path were paying the price with bans. The rest of us, the ones who were following the rules and working hard, were now having suggestions and innuendo thrown at us by former athletes without any evidence whatsoever.

  ‘Back up, Carl Lewis,’ I thought. ‘Don’t talk.’

  When I got into the press conference following the 200 metres final, I let fly.

  ‘I am going to say something controversial right now,’ I said. ‘Carl Lewis, I have no respect for him. The things he says about the track athletes is really downgrading. I think he’s just looking for attention really because nobody really talks much about him … It was really sad for me when I heard the other day what he was saying.’

  It wasn’t all bad, though. There was plenty of positive attention from fans in the Village. But this time I loved it. In 2008 I had been freaked out by the sudden rush of adulation after my medals, but four years on I had grown used to the sight of people running towards me with cameras and scraps of paper as they screamed for autographs.

  I had also grown accustomed to the fact that the Olympics was different – it was a little bit special. During the World Championships, nobody ever asked me for pictures or signatures in the Village because everybody there was a track and field dude. Everyone was cool around one another. But in the Olympics there were loads of other sports on show, represented by people who rarely got the same level of hype as the 100 metres, like in judo or fencing. When they saw me, those guys went crazy.

  I remember after my 100 metres success, a few of us were chilling out in the dining room at the village when three girls from the Swedish handball team came over to talk. I knew nothing about the sport, so I didn’t recognise any of them, but they later introduced themselves as Gabriella Kain, Isabelle Gullden and Jamina Roberts. All of them seemed pretty nice. Maybe too nice: it later turned out they’d lost all five of their matches and had finished bottom in the group stages.

  We hung out for a while, did a bit of talking in my bedroom, but that was it. Someone posted a couple of pictures we had taken on Twitter and the next day the media went crazy. There were headlines all over the place. People were making a big deal of it, insinuating something had happened between us, but it was all innocent fun. Think about it: if we really did anything together, why would we put it on Twitter? That wouldn’t make any sense. Why would I let everybody see what was going on? It was just talking, it was just chilling. They were cool people. They had to leave early in the morning, which was why they wanted to stay up and converse. It was a fun night, though. Hell, all of it had been fun – the races, the crowds, the buzz of London 2012. What could be better than establishing yourself as the superstar of world sport?

  * Carl Lewis came for Jamaica twice. After Beijing he said, ‘Countries like Jamaica do not have a random [drugs testing] programme, so they can go months without being tested.’ Before London he was asked what he thought of me and responded: ‘It’s just … interesting. I watch the results like everyone else and wait … for time to tell.’

  The adrenaline has kept me going throughout my career, I’m crazy for it. I’ve always loved speed, and even after my crash in ’09 I liked to go at it on the road sometimes. People often pressured me to slow down in my car. They said that I shouldn’t drive so fast. But every now and then I got an itch and something in my head said, ‘Yo, Usain, put your foot down.’ I felt chills as the speedometer went up.

  It was the same on the track. Moving at pace has always been a buzz. Once Jamaica won gold in the 4x100 metres a few days after the 200 metres final in London 2012, with myself, Nesta Carter, Michael Frater and Blake, I gathered up another hat-trick of golds, plus a new world record. We smashed our relay time from the 2011 World Championships with a time of 36.84 seconds, and my night with the Swedish handball girls was forgotten. After all the rumours of wild nights and endless parties in the Olympic Village, it was time to enjoy my victory lap as one of the Games’ superstars.

  It’s always good to finish a championship on a positive note. One of the worst things about being a 100 and 200 metres sprinter is that it’s a solo ride, and I’m a team player at heart – it’s probably why I loved cricket as a kid. Hooking up with the relay athletes was one of my favourite moments in any meet. There’s nothing better than hanging out and messing around with the guys. The rivalries we had at home went out of the window and we forgot about the clubs we raced with, whether we were Racers or MVP. Instead, the focus was on running fast and smoking
the opposition.

  Often we talked crap to the other athletes as we prepared ourselves; one of us might make jokes with the Trinidad and Tobago sprinters. I’d look across at my immediate rival in the adjacent lane and shout out, ‘Yo, you think you’re gonna beat me? Get serious.’ It was all joy, but our fast time in London came from a place of determination. At the start of the Games, one of the Jamaican coaches had told us: ‘You should really practise some more baton changes this year.’ So we pushed ourselves in training, making handover after handover. I guess the results spoke for themselves in the end.

  Given all the hard work of 2012, I wanted to take home a souvenir from my last night in London, something to go along with all the golds. As I left the track on the night of the final, I called over to one of the race officials.

  ‘Hey, I’d like to take the baton,’ I said, waving it in the air. ‘That cool?’

  The guy looked at me like I was crazy. He stormed over. ‘You can’t have that. We’ll need it,’ he said.

  ‘Why? The Olympics is over!’

  ‘It’s the rule!’ he snapped.

  I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  ‘What? What is it with the rules? I can’t keep it? Hear me out: the Games are over until Rio 2016. There are no more races. I want this baton to keep, so I can show it off to my friends. I want something different to remind me of winning at London 2012.’

  Then the guy got wild. He started making threats. ‘You’re going to get disqualified if you don’t give me back the baton!’

  I laughed. ‘OK, let’s not cause all this ruckus …’

  That was it. I’d quit arguing. But just as I was about to hand over my prize, a crackling noise came through on the radio clipped to the official’s belt. A voice was yelling through the speaker. It sounded like someone very important.

  ‘What are you doing?’ it shouted. ‘Give it to him!’