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Usain Bolt and the Jamaican relay team: the quickest 4x100 quartet in history
100 metres in 9.58 seconds: simple enough. That’s also an average speed of 23.35 mph, which - if sustained - would lead to a 2:34 mile, and a marathon in little over 67 minutes.
This figure - 9.58 - is central to the legend of Usain Bolt: the world’s fastest man, who has rewritten history time and again, and become, by some margin, the most loved athlete of his era. He is also the most accomplished 200 metre runner of all time, and 19.19 is another number inseparable from the man whose stranglehold on the sport has been supreme.
But there is one figure often forgotten - 36.84 - the time it took Usain Bolt, Nesta Carter, Michael Frater and Yohan Blake to cover one lap of the London Olympic Stadium, as the 2012 Games came to a close.
Athletics is a famously lonely sport: Mo Farah has spoken of his struggles to train away from his family, often by himself, and one of the most fascinating facets of the discipline is that most athletes stand upon a start line, behind a run up, or in a thrower’s circle alone: for ten or twenty seconds, Usain Bolt’s fate lies solely in his own hands.
And yet, for forty seconds of each major championship, he teams up with three of the fastest men in Jamaica - a country laden with sprinting talent - and rewrites history. His prowess as a relay runner, and this is a man who has played a role in the six fastest 4x100s of all time, is often overlooked: let’s pay it some attention.
Relays are not as simple as the sum of the squad's parts. If we added together the personal bests of the world record-breaking quartet in London, Bolt would have anchored them home in 38.93 seconds - 2 seconds adrift of their actual time. That’s a full twenty metres in the sprinting world.
That difference is made up in the exchange zone - the 30 metres in which athletes transfer the baton. The receiving athlete has 10 metres to accelerate, and then there’s a 20 metre space in which the baton must change hands completely. Athletes are chosen with great care to fulfil the varied demands of each of the four legs, something achieved with enormous success in 2012: Blake’s run was an exhibition in perfect bend execution, whilst Bolt’s anchor leg saw him streak past Ryan Bailey of the United States to break the Jamaican team’s own record.
If Bolt were to manage the perfect handover, allowing him to cover the entire 100 metres at top speed, he’d be able to cover the stretch in around 8.15 seconds, if the 10 metre splits we have on record are to be believed. In theory, a relay squad of four Usain Bolt clones, with a first leg of around 9.6, would cross the finishing line just below 34 seconds. The baton for that one might need a heat resistant coating…
Slightly unrealistic, granted. Usain Bolt’s best relay split is 8.7 seconds, and Asafa Powell’s anchor leg in Beijing in 2008 was an eye-watering 8.68. It’s not overly ambitious, in that case, to propose that Jamaica could one day soon produce a relay squad capable of going below 36 seconds. Bolt’s retirement is looming large, but - under his patronage, and inspired by his record-breaking feats - it doesn’t seem too far a stretch to hope for such times in the future.
Despite several world leading times this season, Great Britain’s sprint relay quartets have a history of falling short on the world stage, with several agonising baton blunders marring our record. Bolt has previously said that the Team GB squads overthink the process, and place self-destructive levels of pressure upon themselves: he claims the Jamaicans train less for the event than their less-successful counterparts, and that their enjoyment is central to their numerous relay accolades.
In an unexpected move, the Jamaican told High Snobiety in an interview earlier this year that his ideal relay team would have a slightly different line up: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and Rihanna. 'We may not win, but we would have a lot of fun.' Can't argue with him there. If a quartet's success were determined by force of personality, it's hard to imagine this squad being beaten.
Speaking to Cynthia P Cooke, General Secretary at the Racers Track Club, where Blake, Bolt, and Frater train under the tutelage of Coach Glen Mills, it is apparent that Bolt's personality lends itself well to team events, playing a part in Jamaica's relay ability:
‘In Jamaica, we use the term ‘mannersable’ to describe someone who is very respectful to all, and this describes Usain perfectly. He is an extremely generous person - generous to a fault, I would say - he cares about everyone, and greets every person when he arrives at training.'
‘Even the new athletes at the club feel comfortable around him. He encourages them, points out their errors, and always plays a part in the post training chat in the evenings - which is often about clothes, basketball, football, or just teasing each other.
‘There has always been a competitive element between Usain and Coach Mills: they tease each other a lot - nothing is off limits with those two. For all the jokes, though, he trains very, very hard, which is behind all that he has achieved.’