Word: recording
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shocked everyone but himself. Less than a year after blazing into history by setting a world record in the 100-m dash at the Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt broke his own mark on Aug. 16 in Berlin. At the same site where American Jesse Owens upstaged Adolf Hitler 73 years ago, Bolt shaved more than a tenth of a second off his own record, clocking an absurd 9.58 seconds. Never shy about touting his talent, Bolt hinted at even greater successes ahead. "I think it will stop at 9.4, but you never know," he said. At this point, nothing seems...
Only 17 men have staked claim to the honor, which has grown in stature since Donald Lippincott became the first official world-record holder in the 100-m dash at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Lippincott, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was an unlikely winner: a supplementary member of the U.S. Olympic team, he was allowed to compete in the event only after he agreed to pay his own way to Sweden. After shocking observers by running a 10.6 in a preliminary heat, Lippincott fizzled in the final, finishing third. Still, his mark stood until his compatriot, Charley Paddock...
...Percy Williams, a Canadian, became the first non-American to take the title. Six years later, Owens took the record back with a 10.2-second time - part of the epic performance in Berlin in which the sprinter notched four gold medals and punctured Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy beneath the Fuhrer's scornful gaze...
...success was to "let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible," helped usher in a fleet of impossibly swift African-American sprinters. Among then was Bob (Bullet) Hayes, who won the gold medal in the 100-m sprint at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and recorded what some observers consider the top time ever achieved by a human with an 8.6 split in the 4 x 100-m relay. (Relay marks are faster than regular sprints because runners receive the baton while in motion, enabling them to accelerate quicker.) Hayes later parlayed his speed into...
...Shaving fractions of a second off a speed at which humans aren't built to go isn't easy, and several title holders have crumbled under the pressure. In 1988, Jamaican-born Canadian Ben Johnson clocked a scorching 9.79 at the Seoul Olympics, but quickly had his record expunged after testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol. Johnson wasn't the last World's Fastest Human to succumb to the lure of steroids. American sprinter Justin Gatlin, who ran a 9.77 at a meet in Qatar, is serving a four-year suspension for doping, and Tim Montgomery - who called...