The low snap of a single gunshot bursts from eight speakers at once. Each speaker is positioned behind a single man, and each man is positioned more or less identically in a sprinter's crouch: his feet in the starting blocks, his legs slightly bent, his rear end higher than his shoulders, his fingers splayed on but not beyond the white chalk of the starting line. The color schemes of their Lycra uniforms are different — the blue and white of the United States, the red and white of Trinidad and Tobago, the green and yellow of Jamaica — but otherwise, at this moment, their heads down, their faces invisible, their bodies immobile, it is hard to tell the runners apart
The individuation begins as soon as the sound waves conveying the gunshot traverse the two meters or so between the speakers and the ears of the men. Reaction times differ. The theoretical limit of reaction time in this race, taking into account the time it takes for the sound waves to reach the ears of the sprinters and the time it takes for their brains to process those sound waves and send a signal to their muscles, is 0.1 seconds. The starting blocks each contain Omega-built pressure sensors, and if these sensors detect a push from the foot of any runner beginning less than 0.1 seconds after the gunshot leaves the speaker, that runner is tagged with a false start and the racers must line up and begin again. There is no false start this evening, August 16, 2008, deep in the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing. It is the 100-meter finals of the XXIX Olympia, and the first man off the blocks, 0.133 seconds after the shot, is Richard Thompson, of Trinidad and Tobago. He is followed less than a thousandth of a second later by Walter Dix, of the United States. In the next three hundredths of a second, four more runners shove off against their pressure sensors. And then, finally, 0.165 seconds after the start of the race, in second to last place, Usain Bolt of Jamaica begins to run. He's only been racing this distance for about a year, and the importance of a quick start is one of the things he's still getting used to. His specialty throughout his running career has been the 200 meters, and that's a distance for which the start isn't as crucial. Over two hundred meters, you can make up for lost time. That's not the case in the 100. He's, had to work to overcome some of his sloppy starting habits. For example, he has a tendency to brush his left toe along the ground during the explosive burst from the blocks, generating counterproductive friction. He's gotten better, and usually manages to avoid doing that now, but he does it today, the front of his left shoe scuffing the track as he whips his leg forward to take his second stride. The shoe also happens to be untied, a sloppy mistake, no excuse.
Within the next few seconds, the so-called drive phase, the heads of the runners begin to come up, and their bodies start to straighten, their spines unfurling as their strides lengthen. Although they are still grouped closely together — were the race to end at the 2.4-second mark, Bolt would come in fourth place, by a hair — another point of differentiation now emerges: Bolt is the biggest man in the pack. He's six feet five inches tall, 210 pounds. That makes him three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than the second-biggest competitor.
During the drive phase, Bolt and the rest of the runners are all leaning forward at an unsustainable tilt, their torsos out ahead of where their feet impact the ground. They are basically in the act of falling down, face-first, but their legs, racing against gravity, are preventing that from happening, propelling them forward so hard and so fast that their bodies, instead of face-planting, begin to slowly rise up into a full upright position. Sprinters often describe this phase, when everything happens correctly, as being analogous to liftoff in an airplane.
By approximately the four-second mark, the drive phase has transitioned into the stage known as "full acceleration." The runners are now truly, in the classic sense, running, knees driving up ahead of their hips while their elbows drive back in the opposite direction, a plumb line between where the balls of their feet impact the ground and their chests cleave the air. And it is at this point that the ultimate difference between Usain Bolt and his competitors reveals itself. It is both a simple difference and one that, when you witness it, is hard to fathom.
You must be logged in to post a comment.