Wednesday, 29 January 2014

Usain Bolt :He was never supposed to run in 100m.

Originally, he participated only in 200m(his favorite) and 400m events. The basic logic behind this was that his coaches(and Bolt too) believed that he was just too tall.


Bolt was training very hard for the 2008 Beijing Olympics since he had a poor show at 2004 Athens. So his coach, Glen Mills, asked him to train for another distance to gain additional benefits for his main 200m event. His coach advised him to run 400m in Beijing. Bolt hated 400m event as this meant running 500,600,800m laps for training. He, instead, wanted to try 100m as he preferred speed over endurance. But his coach was reluctant due to the above cited reasons and Bolt asked him that, ifhe were able to run 100m in 10.30 or less then he will run in 100m instead of 400m at Beijing. His coach added another condition that first, Bolt had to break then 36 year old, 200m in 19.86s, National record of Don Quarrie.

   Following this, Bolt broke that record by running 200m in 19.75s at Jamaican Championships. After a month, in July, Bolt ran his first ever official 100m race( after 6-7 years of competitive running in 200/400m) in Rethymno,Crete and hit a time of 10.03s, easily clearing the 10.30 target he set for himself in order to avoid the 400m event.

   Now, the most mind blowing fact here is that all this was happening in 2007.Only one year before 2008 Olympics! We all know what followed...


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