Usain Bolt: 9.58

At the track and field world championships in Germany this evening, Usain Bolt set another world record in the 100-meters: 9.58 seconds, besting his previous record of 9.69. Can he go under 9.5?

Update: Here's the race in HD. It's a lot closer than the Olympic final...Gay was really hauling as well. The Times reports that the 0.11 seconds Bolt shaved off the record was the largest difference since the advent of electronic timing in 1977.

Update: More on the 100 meter record. If you look at a graph of the 100 meter records (and here), Bolt's time looks even more impressive...he broke the record more than it's ever been broken.

But second off, you can also see that Usain Bolt is running much faster than humans ought to be running right now. This should give you an inkling of just how special these performances we're seeing from him are. We shouldn't be seeing times like this until the 2030s. Which means, honestly, that it ought to take around 30 years for someone else to come along and break his record.

Even Michael Johnson was impressed.

And then, of course, Bolt went out and broke his own record in the 200 meters, a record which seemed untouchable at the Olympics last year and he beat it by 0.11 seconds. Here's the video in HD.

(thx, newley, @holgate, and david)

Usain Bolt still fast

Yesterday he ran 200m in 19.59s on a wet track with a headwind, winning by an absurd margin. (via biancolo)

Usain Bolt speeds to record in 150 meters

Yesterday, Usain Bolt broke the unofficial record at the rarely contested distance of 150 meters, running it in 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester's city center. This sounds made up, but here's the video.

(via biancolo)

Usain Bolt: 9.55 seconds

Some physicists have worked out what Usain Bolt's time in the 100 meters in Beijing would have been if he hadn't started celebrating before the finish line: 9.55 seconds. The original paper is here. I tried doing this the day after the race but even the HD footage wasn't good enough to see the tick marks on the track and I didn't want to mess around with all the angles. (via justin blanton)

Update: The folks at The Science of Sport lay out a much more sensible case relying on split times that Bolt would have run somewhere between 9.61 and 9.69. (thx, jim)

Turning the date

With a Russian athlete leading the javelin competition, Czech thrower Barbora Spotakova stepped up for her final throw and thought about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forty years ago that day. After her victory, she described her goal with that throw in a wonderful turn of phrase:

I was wondering if I could turn the date.

I don't know if that's a translation or what, but non-native speakers of English often express ideas more beautifully than native speakers do (Nabokov for example).

Somewhat related...how perfect is the name of the US women's soccer team goalkeeper: Hope Solo.

Update: I need a do-over on this one. First of all, Nabokov is a native English speaker; in fact, he could read and write English before he could Russian. Second, the NY Times modified the quote in that article! When I read it, the selection above was a direct quote attributed to Spotakova. Now the passage reads:

"Aug. 21 is a very special day for the Czech Republic -- it's the 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 1968," she said afterward. "I of course had a Russian competitor against me. She was winning with such a long throw," she added, and said she wondered if she'd be able to turn the date to her advantage.

That's much less poetic...I wonder if there was a translation misunderstanding or something. (thx, dan & nivan)

You vs. Usain Bolt

Race Usain Bolt in this button mashing Flash game. I was a fair Track & Fielder back in the day so I beat Bolt on my first attempt. [Insert elaborate archery pose emoticon here.] (thx, scott)

Michael Johnson's 19.32

A look at just how crazy Michael Johnson's 200m world record is.

Eyeballing the chart would suggest that the cutting edge of human achievement in the 200m is anything sub-19.7. A 19.59 at Beijing would be phenomenal. Then you scroll down -- way down -- and you hit Johnson's 19.32.

Johnson has stated that he's fully prepared for Usain Bolt to break his record.

The inside lane advantage

The Olympic starting gun gives the runners on the inside of the track (near the gun) an unfair advantage because the sound reaches the outer lanes later and the loud bang scares inside-lane runners out of the blocks earlier.

Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.

American sprinter Justin Gatlin sets world record

American sprinter Justin Gatlin sets world record in the 100 meter dash: 9.76 seconds. But, could he beat a horse the length of a basketball court?

Update: Due to a rounding error on the timekeeper's part, Gatlin merely tied the world record.

Track and field records: how are they

Track and field records: how are they measured and can we trust them?.