Usain Bolt's Chicken Nugget Diet Sparks Twitter Reaction

There are feats in sports that seem outrageous and unlikely to ever occur again. Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games. Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in a game.

And of course, Usain Bolt eating 1,000 Chicken McNuggets from McDonald's during the Beijing Olympics and still winning three gold medals.

Wait, what?

In his new memoir, “Faster Than Lightning," Bolt claims he basically lived on a diet of chicken nuggets during the Beijing Games. From Susannah Cahalan of the New York Post:

"

During the Beijing Olympics, Bolt, then 22, thought that Chinese food was “odd.” So he hit the nearest McDonald’s in search of his favorite food: chicken McNuggets.

“At first I ate a box of 20 for lunch, then another for dinner. The next day I had two boxes for breakfast, one for lunch and then another couple in the evening. I even grabbed some fries and an apple pie to go with it,” he writes.

He estimates that during the 10 days he spent in Beijing, he downed 100 nuggets every 24 hours. That equals 1,000 chunks of chicken. “Man, I should have gotten a gold medal for all that chowing down,” he writes.

"

Not surprisingly, Twitter was abuzz with this odd, slightly unbelievable, and some might contend sort of gross story. 

There was awe.

There was disbelief.

There was some feigned delusions of grandeur, such as this tweet from Elliott Bambrough:

There was a reminder of the cold, hard reality of the lack of athleticism that plagues most of the population, courtesy of Jay Busbee from Yahoo! Sports:

There were shocking revelations of similar training regiments, as this one from Piers Morgan, who somehow managed to make this story about footy:

And some people weren't even mad, they were just impressed:

But here's the kicker—Bolt may have missed out on a brilliant marketing campaign here. As Darren Rovell of ESPN reports, Bolt isn't officially attached to the company in any capacity:

He's loving it, but he's not getting paid a dime for it. 

Here's the real question, raised in a conversation between Jeremy Schaap of ESPN and Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated—will Bolt now release Super Size Me 2, a documentary contradicting Morgan Spurlock's film in which he only ate McDonald's for a month and suffered the consequences?

I think Deitsch's response is probably central to the core lesson to be taken here—don't try this at home, kids. Well, unless you are in college, are hurting for cash and don't have any Olympic events to train for, as CBS Sports jokes:

Bolt is a freak of nature, and one that perhaps should consider using some of his sponsorship money to buy a nutritionist and chef, if he hasn't already. Eventually all that fast food will go straight to your hips, Usain. 

Or so I've heard...

Hit me up on Twitter—my tweets once ate 20 Chicken McNuggets then attempted to run up a flight of stairs. It didn't go so well.