In the perfect post-script to my last post, many of you probably saw Usain Bolt follow his Phelpsian 9.69 world record 100m performance with another gold and another world record in the 200m this morning, in 19.30 seconds. As amazing as his 100m run was, the 200m was probably the more impressive of the two.
I have a crystal clear memory of Michael Johnson running his 19.32 in the Atlanta games in 1996, and the staggering thing about that performance was that the world record that he broke was his own, of 19.66, and the fastest time before that was 19.72. That just doesn't happen. World records at these distances fall by 1, 2, or 3 hundredths of a second. Johnson set the mark by 34 hundredths. It was an incredible sprint, and a record that I'm sure anyone who knew anything was sure they would never see broken.
Since Johnson's run in '96, only three men have bested his previous mark of 19.66 - and they ran in 19.65, 19.63, and 19.62. 19.32 was simply completely out of reach for a long, long time. And then Usain Bolt beat it.
No one has ever set both those world records in the same meet.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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