Word: bolte
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bolt is an exciting showman and, clearly, a gifted runner, but is he an inimitable oddity, or proof that athletes are simply getting faster overall? World speed records have fallen like dominoes at these Olympic Games (in swimming too, you may have heard), and experts think humans can get faster still. Half a century or ago or so, we didn't believe a human could run a 4-min. mile - until Roger Bannister proved us wrong in 1954 when he ran it in 3 mins. 59.4 secs. At the 1936 Games in Berlin, sprinter Jesse Owens won the 100m gold...
...genetically blessed with 70% fast-twitch and 30% slow-twitch muscles, which is what allows them to push off so fast and so powerfully, according to Scott Trappe, who heads the human performance laboratory at Indiana's Ball State University and has studied sprinters' muscles. But elite sprinters like Bolt may have even more of something that other world-class sprinters don't: superfast-twich muscles, which perform at double the rate of regular fast-twitch muscles, creating even more force. Trappe says regular folks have 1% to 2% superfast-twitch skeletal muscle mass, but in a sprinter like Bolt...
That helps explain why Bolt's legs move fast enough to be a blur. When people run, they are essentially bouncing though the air from one leg to another, says Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University who studies how and why the human body looks and works as it does. What determines how fast people go is their stride length - a function of how long the legs are, how powerfully they push off into a stride and how far forward the body jumps - and their stride rate, which is how fast they can propel their legs...
...appears that Bolt takes advantage of a little of both. At 6 ft. 5 in., he's nearly half a foot taller than many other gold-medal sprinters; compared to his Olympic competition, Bolt's step was 1 ft. longer, allowing him to cover 100m in 41 steps. The other athletes needed, on average, 47. That helps, considering Bolt isn't the best starter - he's relatively slower off the block, but he separates himself at the end of the race, when "he's still able to turn his legs over fast enough with high power," says Ed Coyle...
...Modern sprinters seem to be operating close to the limits of the human body," says Bramble. "Still, when someone who is not built like a classic sprinter - [Bolt is] taller and leaner than most - smashes the world record while making it look easy, maybe all bets should...