Usain Bolts

To appreciate Usain Bolt's athleticism at the Beijing Olympic Games this past August we need to understand what 100 meters and 9.69 seconds are.

100 meteres is 328 feet.

Walk up to a 30 story building and look straight up. That's 100 meters too.

Go to New York city and stand on one block corner and look at the opposite corner. That's only 80 meters.

If you're in bumper to bumper traffic, get out of your car and stand on the back bumper. The tip of the 20th car you see is 100 meters away.

It takes more than 9.69 seconds to:.

• brush the top left hand corner of your mouth.
• prepare a bowl of cereal.
• get a commercial airliner (travelling 150 mph) one ninth the distance down the runway.
• pretty much do anything...

Usain Bolt took a 190 pound body from a dead stop to a 100 meter journey lasting less than 10 seconds. This requires him to propel himself at an average of 34 feet per second. At this speed Steve Nash could steal the ball at the top of his own 3 point line and take it to the opposite hoop in 1.8 seconds. If you looked down to grab some chips, you'd miss it.

Remember Michael Jordan's slam from the free throw line? Each step Usain took during his historic sprint was that long. Each step.

And each step took a quarter of a second. About the time it takes to perform a natural blink of the eye.

Frustratingly for the record books, Usain relaxed and beat his chest during the crucial last few feet of his gold medal sprint. Had he stretched into the finish line, he could have shaved off another 1 or 2 hundreds off his time. 9.67. Imagine that.

If an 1100 pound grazing horse had wandered in front of Usain, it would have been shoved over 5 feet down the track.

No man crossed the 10 second mark until 1968 when Jim Hines broke the mark in Sacramento, California.

The 9.90 second mark was not legally punctured until Carl Lewis did it with 9.86 seconds in Tokyo, Japan in 1991. Lewis won 6 Olympic golds and 6 world championships in either the 100m, 4 x 100 m relay or the 200 meter. And he could not blow below 9.86 seconds.

1999's World Championships in Athens saw USA's Maurice Green shatter the "unbreakable" 9.80 mark with a 9.79 performance. After which no one did anything really noticeable until 2007 gave us the 9.74 record by Jamaica's Asafa Powell.

Then, the latter months of 2008 ushered in the Usain era with a 9.72 and 9.69 set-and-break-your-own-record showstoppers by the Jamaican.

At 22 years of age, Bolt is not expected to peak until about age 27. Carl Lewis and Canadian Donovan Bailey peaked in their early 30's. At 26 years of age, Lewis gave a 9.93 performance which he would disintegrate with a 9.86 showing at age 30. Let's give Usain the same .07 second improvement for his 100 meter and take it off a 9.66 (if he actually leaned into his finish line) and we have a possible sub 9.6 record at approximately 9.59 in the year 2013. Heck put a windy day at his back and look out...