Agency :
Usain Bolt, whose 9.58 seconds world record for the 100 metres is now 16 years old, says he could have run 9.42sec in the carbon-plated “super-spikes” that on Thursday’s sprinters are racing in.
The Jamaican set his mark at the 2009 world championships in Berlin, breaking his own 9.69sec record from the previous year’s Beijing Olympics, and it has now stood for longer than the 14 years of Jim Hines’s 9.95sec clocked at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Research by Puma, the company that shod him through his glorious era of dominance, predicted that Bolt would run 9.42sec in today’s shoes and, speaking at an event ahead of the world championships in Tokyo, he said: “I fully agree.”
“Someone who continued after I retired was Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce and I saw what she did – she got faster with the spikes,” Bolt said on Sept 11.
“I probably would have run way faster if I’d continued and if I knew that spikes would have got to that level maybe I would have, because it would have been great to compete at that level and running that fast.”
Bolt’s compatriot Kishane Thompson ran 9.75sec at the Jamaican championships in June – the fastest time by anyone for 10 years to make him the sixth-fastest of all time – but Bolt said he was not worried about anyone breaking his record anytime soon.
“I think the talent is there and those who are coming up will do well but, at this present moment, I don’t think they will be able to break the world record,” he said.
on bus to smell it Bolt retired in 2017 with six Olympic and seven world individual 100m and 200m golds, and no Jamaican man has won a global sprint title since his Rio Olympic double in 2016.
