Jamaican sprint king Usain Bolt has revealed how he left the American track legend red-faced after breaking his world record when least expected it.
Usain Bolt, world’s fastest man, has spilt the beans about how he silenced American sprint icon Michael Johnson.
The Jamaican, via the High Performance Podcast, explained how Johnson insisted that he wasn’t ready to break his 200m record in 2009. According to Bolt, Johnson claimed that it would take another two years for the 38-year-old to finally lower Johnson’s 200m record of 19.32 seconds set at the 1996 Olympic Games.
PAY ATTENTION: Stay updated with the Latest Athletics News in Kenya from Pulse Sports
Even for eilte Olympians like Gabby Thomas, the pressures of track and filed can sometime get overwhelming and she has her own way of getting away from it.
Bolt then went on to recall proving Johnson wrong at the Beijing 2008 Games, where the American claimed he would not yet beat his 200m world record. Ultimately, this would prove to be Bolt’s arrival on the world stage, as he claimed gold medals in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay, setting world records in the former two.
Laughing, he remembered: “One of the funniest videos, in ’08, I think it was BBC he was broadcasting with. If you go on the internet you can find this video and they were asking him: ‘Oh do you think he’s gonna break the record?'”
“And he was like, ‘No I think his mechanics need some work, it will take him two more years to get to the world record’. And then in the same day I broke the world record!”
)
Usain Bolt has finally opined the reason Kishane Thompson lost the 100m Olympic title to Noah Lyles.
“It’s one of my best videos, I watch it every now and then.”
Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100m and 200m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012, and 2016). He also won two 4×100 relay gold medals. He gained worldwide fame for his double sprint victory in world record times at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which made him the first person to hold both records since fully automatic time became mandatory.
An 11-time World Champion, Bolt won consecutive World Championship 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay gold medals from 2009 to 2015, with the exception of a 100m false start in 2011. He is the most successful male athlete of the World Championships.
Bolt is the first athlete to win four World Championship titles in the 200m and is one of the most successful in the 100m with three titles, being the first person to run sub-9.7s and sub-9.6s races.
