KINGSTON, Jamaica, Feb 28 AFP - Beijing Olympic sprint star Usain Bolt was pleased with two winnings runs here on Saturday at the Gibson Relays, but says more work is needed to get into top shape.
Overall I think I did pretty well, but it was a little bit tiring, because I am not in the best shape,'' Bolt said. But I am getting there.’’
Bolt, who won Olympic 100-metre gold in a world record 9.69 seconds and took 200m gold in a world record 19.30 seconds, helped his Racers Lions Club in the 4x100-metre and mile relays.
In the 4x100, Bolt led his team home in a meet record 38.10 seconds, the fastest time in the world this year, eclipsing the 38.62-second performance by Jamaican Asafa Powell’s MVP squad at the Sydney Classic.
The time beat the previous meet record of 38.70 set by the High Performance Centre in 2007 and was .38 ahead of the runner-up Racers Track Club, the second of the Glen Mills-coached group on show.
Bolt returned later to run the third leg of the Racers Lions mile relay.
The team, which included Olympic 400m semi-finalist Ricardo Chambers and Commonwealth Games bronze medallist Jermaine Gonzales, won in 3:04.27.
AFP
Thanks for the vid. Bolt didn’t look very good to me, but it’s only February.
I’m getting a 8.8s split for him, so he should definitely be in sub 10 shape. His average stride length for this run was about 2.63m (38 strides), by the way. Only three national relay teams (Jamaica, USA and Trinidad) ran faster than 38.10s last year, and only six countries were faster than Glen Mill’s B team.
If you don’t mind my asking, how did you time it, and what video were you timing it from? I thought his stride looked a bit short (with good frequency), and he didn’t really put much distance into the person close to him (or at least it appeared that way to me).
Does anyone know how stride length on a straight is related to stride length on a curve? I suppose we could compare his anchor relay leg of this past weekend to his 2nd leg of the 2007 WC relay.