![]() ![]() ![]() You may have just 24 hours bragging rights before it gets shifted to the United States because of Fred Kerley," Gordon said on the podcast on Friday night. "You may have just 24 hours left of the trump card of Usain Bolt being the world record holder. The bold assertion came from Gordon Mack, an analyst on the podcast who proposed American Fred Kerley as the one to break Bolt’s record. Journal reference: Significance, DOI: 10.1111/j. Bolt has taken a jab at the FloTrack podcast which suggested hours before the World Athletics Championships men’s 100m final on Saturday, that his 9.58 world record set in 2009 was about to be broken. Halving these times to get a theoretical 100-metre score means that Blake covered the distance in 9.495 seconds compared to Bolt’s 9.53 seconds, making Blake faster than Bolt – in theory at least. This meant that it took Blake just 18.99 seconds to run the 200 metres itself, compared with 19.06 seconds for Bolt in Berlin after factoring in his starting time. At the end of last season, Bolt’s training partner, Yohan Blake, ran the second-fastest 200 metres ever in Daegu, South Korea, at 19.26 seconds, a shade short of Bolt’s world record breaking 19.19 second sprint in Berlin in 2009.īut Blake took an eternity to get going – no less than 0.27 seconds. “It’s easy to say Bolt could gain 0.05 seconds with a perfect start, but trying to achieve that sort of quick getaway got him disqualified in the finals of last year’s world championships,” he says.Īlso, if the tailwind is slightly more than 2 metres per second, the record wouldn’t count, and with London at sea level, there will be no extra altitude to aid him during this summer’s Olympics, says Denny, who worked out his “theoretical maximum” on the basis of historical sprint times.Ĭontroversially, Barrow also argues that Bolt is no longer the fastest man on earth. “They serve to illustrate how far we are from any type of ‘ultimate’ sprinting speed in the men’s 100 metres, and the scale of the improvements possible.”ĭenny agrees that there are many reasons why it should be possible for Bolt to run faster, but that these seldom materialise in reality. “These are amazing improvements but they can all happen without Bolt becoming a better sprinter,” Barrow writes. Records don’t stand unless they’re at altitudes below 1000 metres. And if under those conditions he managed to achieve a perfect reaction time of 0.1 seconds, he would reduce his record to 9.48 seconds.Īlready a full tenth of a second faster than his Berlin record, Bolt could finally shave a further 0.03 seconds off his time if he ran the race at an altitude up to, but not exceeding, 1000 metres, where the air is thinner and offers less resistance. Barrow calculates that if he had the maximum allowable tailwind of 2 metres per second, he would waste less effort battling wind drag. Secondly, when Bolt ran his epic race, he had a tailwind of just 0.9 metres per second. This would lower the final time for the sprint from 9.58 to 9.56 seconds. But even with this limitation, Bolt could safely cut his reaction time from 0.146 to 0.13 seconds. Under international athletics rules, sprinters are judged to have made a false start if they leave the blocks within 0.1 seconds of the starting gun. This means that it actually took Bolt just 9.434 seconds to run the 100 metres. In Berlin, he was second slowest to react to the starting gun, taking 0.146 seconds to get going compared with 0.119 seconds for the speediest starter. Firstly, Barrow notes that Bolt is notoriously slow off the blocks. ![]()
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