Word: bolte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Usain Bolt may have just broken the human speed limit. Last week, he took two gold medals in the Olympic 100m, shattering his own world record with a time of 9.69 secs., and the 200m with a time of 19.3 secs., obliterating by two-hundredths of a second the long-standing world record Michael Johnson set at the Atlanta Games...
...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...
...What's more, while star Jamaican runners used to go abroad to train and study, most now opt to stay home, further endearing them to their countrymen. Bolt and Fraser, for example, eschewed lucrative U.S. college scholarship opportunities to attend the University of Technology in Kingston. Jamaican sports officials insist having the athletes on native soil has also led to a far lower incidence of the kind of doping scandals that have bedeviled Jamaican-born sprinters in the past. Bolt even made a point earlier this summer of letting it be known he'd sworn off partying to better prepare...