I started following athletics sometime around the Sydney Olympics in 2000 when the men’s 100m world record stood at 9.79 seconds, set by Maurice Greene a year earlier at a meet in Athens, Greece.
I really admired Greene and it was a great world record, but there was another performance that always captured my imagination; a run of 9.69 by Obadele Thompson from Barbados.
The time was set in El Paso, Texas, on April 13th, 1996. It was aided by a massive +5.7 m/s tail wind, well over the legal limit of 2.0 m/s, so it was obviously never officially recognized as a world record, but this never stopped me from fantasizing about when – if ever – will we see a faster run. The track in El Paso is also more than a thousand meters above sea level, so beside the asterisk for wind, the run was also plagued with a mark of ‘A’ for altitude-assistance.
I remember desperately searching for the video of the run when we first got the internet back in the early 2000s, but as far as I know, it doesn’t exist.
It took 12 years before the time was beaten by Tyson Gay with a wind-assisted run of 9.68 seconds at the 2008 US Olympic Trials in Eugene. But his performance was also aided (though not as much as Thompson’s) by a +4.1 m/s tail wind.
We had to wait another two months before the legend himself, Usain Bolt, finally managed to post a legal time of 9.69 seconds at the 2008 Olympic final in Beijing. And he managed to do it with zero wind (0.0 m/s)!!!
I was over the moon when I finally got to see a 9.69 performance LIVE on television.
The rest is history, and we all know how Bolt lowered the time to 9.58 (+0.9 m/s) in Berlin at the 2009 World Championships.
Since then we saw four more sub 9.70 runs in any conditions, the last of which was a time of 9.69 (-0.1 m/s), set by Yohan Blake of Jamaica in 2012. We then had to wait almost 5 years for another one.
It was Andre De Grasse of Canada who took advantage of incredibly windy conditions at a Diamond League meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, by storming to a time of 9.69 with a +4.8 m/s tail wind and – in a way – completing the circle. I never saw Obadele’s run, but this was a great vindication :).
Sub 9.70 Performances (all conditions):
9.58 (+0.9) Usain Bolt (JAM), Berlin, 16 Aug 2009 9.63 (+1.5) Usain Bolt (JAM), London, 5 Aug 2012 9.68 (+4.1) Tyson Gay (USA), Eugene, 29 June 2008 9.69 ( 0.0) Usain Bolt (JAM), Beijing, 16 Aug 2008 9.69 (+2.0) Tyson Gay (USA), Shanghai, 20 Aug 2009 9.69 (-0.1) Yohan Blake (JAM), Lausanne, 23 Aug 2012 9.69 A (+5.7) Obadele Thompson (BAR), El Paso, 13 Apr 1996 9.69 (+4.8) Andre De Grasse (CAN), Stockholm, 18 Jun 2017
So despite the wind, congratulations to Andre De Grasse for a fantastic performance and a great show for the crowd.
PS: Check out this wind/altitude correction calculator. It uses a standardized formula to adjust the time to what it might have been in conditions with zero wind and at sea level.
Žiga P. Škraba
Obadele Thompson in his prime vs Bolt, he was always in his prime -both 100m & 200 m
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