Fairborn commencement
Badin graduation
Division I regional track finals
Bolt takes gold in just 41 strides
Jamaican wins 100 in speedy 9.69 seconds; former 'Fastest Man' Powell finishes fifth; Gay fails to make final.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
BEIJING — Imagine if he had really tried. Pounding his chest, turning up the palms of his outstretched arms, mugging for the cameras before he even crossed the finish line, Usain Bolt rewrote the record books again and captured his first Olympic medal Saturday, Aug. 16, toying with the field and running the
100-meter dash in a stunning 9.69 seconds.
His left shoe was untied when he crossed the finish line. Not that it mattered much. He could've walked across. It was a blowout, a rout, no contest, as the 21-year-old Jamaican took a huge lead halfway through the race and finished upright, looking to his right to find not a challenger but instead a bunch of photographers recording history.
"It wasn't planned," the newly crowned "World's Fastest Man" said of his running celebration. "My aim was to come out and win. When I saw the time, I'm celebrating. I'm happy."
He broke his own record, set in May in New York, by three-hundreths of a second and became the first sprinter to set the world record in the Olympics since Donovan Bailey ran 9.84 at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
"No one will get near it," fellow Jamaican Michael Frater, the sixth-place finisher, said of Bolt's record.
Bolt beat Richard Thompson of Trinidad and Tobago by 0.2 second — more than a body length — while American Walter Dix was third. The race marked the first time six runners broke 10 seconds in the Olympics. There was no wind — the reading was 0.0.
Asafa Powell, the Jamaican who held the world record for three years before Bolt grabbed it, continued his string of disappointments in big races, fading to fifth for the second straight Olympics.
American Tyson Gay, who was supposed to be the third part of a so-called dream race, didn't even make the final, eliminated with a fifth-place finish in his semi.
Bolt's specialty has been the 200 meters, and he will be a heavy favorite to win that one next week in what would be the first men's Olympic sprint double since Carl Lewis in 1988. But Bolt persuaded his coach 13 months ago to let him try the 100, too.
Bolt is 6-foot-5, one reason he was never really pegged to run the 100 — men that tall aren't supposed to be able to get out of the starting blocks fast enough to win the shortest sprint.
Bolt needed 41 strides to cover the 100 meters.
