More than 48 hours had passed since Usain Bolt’s redefining of the 100 metres, and Ato Boldon, the voluble Trinidadian who used to run the 100 for a good living, was still trying to comprehend what he had seen.Bolt, for his part, did not appear to be asking himself too many questions over the last couple of days, comfortably negotiating the first three rounds of his next challenge: the 200m.On Saturday, the Jamaican ran 9.69 with no measurable wind, which is highly unusual for an outdoor race. The consensus is that every metre per second of following wind subtracts approximately five one-hundredths of a second from a sprinter’s time. “You put the wind he had in New York (when he clocked 9.72) behind the 9.69 here, and we could be down in the 9.5s except that he shut down with 20 meters to go,” Boldon said. “So now, is that in the 9.4s? It’s mind-boggling.”In the dope-tainted world of international athletics, mind-boggling isn’t always a good thing, but Bolt, who has never failed a drug test, has arguments in his favor. He is not a suspiciously late bloomer. Instead, he is a precocious talent (the youngest male world junior champion in the 200 at age 15) who has only recently started running the 100 seriously and who, at 21, is the youngest man to break the 100 record.More intriguing from a technical standpoint, there is the new paradigm theory, linked to Bolt’s unusual 6-foot-5 stature. So how does Bolt, the tallest man to hold the world record, do it?He had the second-slowest reaction time in the eight-man field. “It takes a while when you’re that tall to actually get into the groove when you’re coming from sitting down,” said Donovan Bailey, the 1996 Olympic champion in the 100 and a former world-record holder. Boldon thinks early pressure applied by the eventual silver medallist Richard Thompson in an adjacent lane helped Bolt push himself further. Bolt has a high knee lift for a sprinter, which helps him generate force. But despite the physics involved, Bolt has a quicker turnover rate than someone of his height. In fact, he has a turnover of somebody six feet. “Add that to the fact that he’s only taking 40 to 41 strides to finish a 100, and you cannot argue with the math,” said Boldon, adding that he and another former 100m record-holder Maurice Greene, both 5’ 9”, used to finish their races in 45 or 46 strides. Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell, Bolt’s rivals, are at about 45. Carl Lewis required 43 or 44.Bolt was at 41 strides on Saturday but, according to Boldon, would surely have been at 40 had he not slowed toward the end. “All of a sprint’s velocity is created from point of touchdown until the foot is directly below the body,” said Dr. Ralph Mann, a biomechanist with USA Track and Field. “Bolt’s long stride means that he is creating velocity for a longer period.”French sprint coach Jacques Piasenta contends that Bolt has “extraordinary feet” that allow him to push hard and fast off the track.The last word, as usual, went to Boldon: “Swimming has their LZR suits and their deeper pools,” he said. “We have a 6’5” guy who’s running 9.6s and beating the rest of the Olympic field by two tenths of a second. He’s our new technology.”
