It’s August 2009 at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin and the starting gun for the final of the Men’s 100m is about to go off. Little did the world know that they were about to witness greatness, as Usain Bolt destroys his already incredible world record 100m time of 9.69 with a time of an earth-shattering 9.58 seconds. 

 

It is a feat that shook the world of Athletics and cemented him as a God among men. A whole 0.14 seconds faster than the next quickest man had ever run at the time and a  clocking  still over a tenth of a second faster than the next closest time from another athlete. In fact, Bolt has run all 3 of the fastest 100m’s of all time (9.58 in Berlin, 9.63 at the London Olympics and his 9.69 in Beijing which has still only been equalled since).  

 

Therefore, when he retired in 2017, he left what can only be described as a Bolt-sized hole in the world of athletics and observers have been waiting for the next Usain Bolt. But 7 years on, almost a whole generation of athletes later, we are still waiting. Hence, this piece asks the pertinent question, will we ever see another Usain Bolt? 

 

No sprinter has managed to retain gold medals in either the Olympics or the World Championships, which suggests there is no sprinter ready to dominate as Bolt did and take up his mantle.  

 

In fact, since Bolt retired, no sprinter has even come within 0.18 seconds of his 9.58 world record. The most widely touted youngster to take up his mantle ahead of the Paris Olympics in 2024 was Noah Lyles.  Indeed, Lyles proved doubters wrong by getting his hands on the coveted gold medal in a thrilling final earlier this month. He is the first since Bolt then to win the Olympics and World Championships in consecutive years. But even he is still 0.20 seconds away from Bolt’s record.  

 

So, it seems unlikely that Bolt’s record will disappear anytime soon, such is the gap between his own record and others from past and present. In fact, it was probably in Bolt’s own era that his records were most at risk of being matched or surpassed, with fellow countryman Yohan Blake and Tyson Gay of the US both equalling his first world record time of 9.69 time. Whereas since then, the  gold medal-winning times  have become far slower. 

 

Interestingly, Blake is said by some to have been even faster than Bolt, and there is a basis for this claim. Blake’s 200m PB of 19.26 had a very slow reaction time of 0.27s. Bolt’s 200m PB of 19.19, had a reaction time of 0.13. Thus, Blake achieved a higher top speed than Bolt in the 200m, meaning he covered the distance of 200m faster than anyone ever has and, in this race, also covered the distance of 100m faster than anyone else too. So, this potentially humanises Bolt to a degree from his God-like status.  

 

Another peculiar claim to be the fastest man ever comes in the form of another of Bolt’s rivals, Justin Gatlin, who on a Japanese game show, ran a 9.45s 100m. The caveat is that he ran with artificial wind assistance and turbines, and so was clearly meant as a gimmick, not to be considered an official time. But it at least serves to show that, mechanically speaking, a human can move their limbs fast enough to cover that distance, meaning there is a mechanistic scope for improvement on Bolt’s time. The question is, would a human be able to move that fast legally?  

 

This brings into question then whether Bolt was just a freak anomaly in human genetics and whether current athletes have already reached the summit of human potential in the 100m. For the future entertainment in the sport though, it is better that this is not the case and that one day we do witness someone break Bolt’s record. 

 

Human biology and history at least, does suggest that logically, this should happen. The winner of the 100m at the first Olympic Games won it with 12 seconds. The first officially ratified 100m time in 1912 was 10.6 seconds. So, the fact that it has now come all the way down to 9.58 seconds, regardless of less accurate timings further back in history, clearly shows that as knowledge about sports science, nutrition and training has improved, so have the 100m times. So, this trend is likely to continue, even if it is by increasingly smaller amounts.  

 

Having said that, it is intuitive to think that by the same token, once nutrition, training and conditioning become perfect, there must be a point at which there is no more room for improvement beyond random individuals just becoming able to physically run faster without the benefit of any extra nutritional or coaching benefit. 

 

Many argue we have reached this point. In fact, many claimed we had reached that point before Bolt came along, such is the rapid development of sports science in the last century. But given the nature in which Bolt so brazenly destroyed the assumption that humans could not get any faster and thus dismantled those assumptions, we are led to assume something similar could happen in the future.  

 

After all, Bolt was an anomaly, both statistically and physically. He defied conventional wisdom at 6”5 that height disadvantages sprinters. Sports science tells us that sprinters should be, and mostly are, compact, with fast-twitch fibres. Never before and never since have we seen a man of Bolt’s frame try his hand (or should I say feet) at the 100m. It works against conventional sports science and yet he broke all the models and predictions anyway, like an anomaly does. So perhaps it is best to give up predicting when the next Bolt will come along and just trust that they will, since it will be impossible to predict anyway.  

 

The really interesting question to ask though is whether it is mechanically or physically possible for humans to run faster. In other words, is there a point at which, say 9 seconds, under which a human is incapable of running faster?  

 

Biochemist Peter Weyland says sprinters run fast based on how hard they hit the ground and how little contact time they have with the ground. Hitting the ground as hard as you can whilst hitting the ground for as little time as possible is thus the golden recipe. A top sprinter like Bolt will hit the ground with about 5 times his body weight with a ground contact time of around 0.085 seconds, enabling him to reach a speed of 27mph. What makes this scarier is that when Bolt was approaching the last 20 metres of his world record run, he appeared to slow down while approaching the finish line, which begs the question could his 9.58 have been even quicker? We will come onto this shortly. 

 

The second method of clawing back time in a race is through cutting down reaction time at the start. But as we will see, this doesn’t offer much margin for improvement either.  

 

 

 Neurologists have claimed that the human brain is only programmed to detect stimuli after about 25 milliseconds. Bolt’s reaction time was 0.146 seconds (146 milliseconds). So, there is some margin to cut down here if his reaction time was perfect. But at this point, it should be noted that the World Athletics Rules state that a reaction time of anything under 0.1s will be deemed a false start. So, the minimum reaction time to work with is 0.1s. 

 

This is what leads some to ponder how fast Bolt’s 9.58 could have been, which opens him up to the potential of being even quicker than he is, without asking him to become any bit of a faster sprinter. And as noted, this is all before even considering the fact he himself slowed down in celebration when he ran his world record time! 

 

John Barrow of Cambridge University, notes Bolt actually covered 100m in 9.43s, because his reaction time was 0.146s. He also notes that he was running with a wind speed of 0.9m/s, which slowed him down because the maximum legal wind speed, which would have propelled him along even quicker, is 2m/s. This in addition to running at the maximum legal altitude (1000m) where there is less air resistance, would have taken off another 0.03s.  

 

So, in total, this means that while Bolt ran 9.58 officially, Bolt ran 9.43s unofficially and could have run 9.4s with a perfect reaction time. But with the restriction of a minimum 0.1s reaction time, his 100m in perfect conditions running at that speed could have come down to 9.51s. 

 

Therefore, when considering whether we will ever see another Usain Bolt, we must accept that he was a freak of nature, but that doesn’t mean that history cannot repeat itself. Even though logic and the subsequent generation after Bolt suggest otherwise, science tells us that it is at least possible to see a runner better than Bolt. Running at perfect altitude, with maximum wind speed and  a perfect reaction time, seems to offer the best promise for a top sprinter to beat Bolt’s times. By how much, we can’t be sure. To claim we could be certain of an impossible-to-beat time would be to make the same mistake as those in the past did in thinking that running sub 9.7 was impossible. How foolish those who said that looked when Bolt came along….