Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography

Aaaaaaaghhhhhh!

My car careered across the lanes and I could see we were running out of road, fast. It’s not a cool thing to watch the highway falling away, a ditch rushing into view ahead. I knew right then where our asses were going to end up. I put a hand to the roof to prepare myself for the impact, wrestling the steering wheel with the other, in a desperate attempt to regain control.

It’s coming, it’s coming … Oh God, is this it?

I was terrified the car might pop up and jump into a sideways roll.

‘Please don’t flip,’ I thought. ‘Man, please don’t flip.’

We flipped.

The world turned upside down. I felt like a piece of training kit on spin cycle in the washing machine, tumbling over and over. Trees, sky, road passed in the windscreen. Trees, sky, road. Trees, sky, road … We hit the ditch with a Smash! Everything lurched forward and suddenly I was upside down. The airbags blew, all sorts of crap rattled around in the car, keys, loose change, cell phones, and then a weird silence came down, a spooky calm where nothing stirred apart from the tick-tick-ticking of the car’s indicator switch and the pouring rain outside.

I was alive. We all were, just.

‘Yo, you’re in one piece,’ I thought as I busted the door open with a hard shove.

But only God knew how, or why.

***

Sometimes people talk about close calls and near-death incidents and how they can change a man’s way of thinking for ever. For me, my smash on Highway 2000 was that moment, and after the accident I couldn’t view life in the same way again. We had survived. But how? Staggering away from the wreck should have been impossible, especially after the car had flipped over three times.

Everybody knew that speed was my thing, but I hadn’t expected velocity and horse power to so nearly cut me short, and in the hours after the crash, I experienced all the emotions usually suffered by a lucky driver in a car accident. There was guilt for my friends, who had suffered some bumps, bruises and whiplash. I felt stress, the shiver that came with realising that I’d cheated death as I replayed the disaster over and over in my head. I’d been driving fast, my wheels were out of control, and at 70 miles an hour I had flipped and bounced across the road and into a ditch.

Truth was, I should have been gone, a world phenomenon athlete cut down in his prime; a horrible newspaper headline for the world to read:

THE FASTEST MAN ON EARTH KILLED!

Learn the story of how an Olympic gold medallist and world record holder in the 100, 200 and 4x100 metres lived fast and died young!

The fact that I’d made it out alive was a miracle. I was fully functioning too, without a bruise or a mark on my entire body. Well, apart from some thorn cuts. Several long prickles had sliced open the flesh in my bare feet as I crawled from the wreckage, and the wounds were pretty deep. But those injuries felt like small change compared to what might have happened.

‘Seriously?’ I thought, when I was driven home from hospital later that day. ‘There wasn’t even a dent on me – how did that happen?’

A few weeks later, as the horror of what had happened sunk in, when I looked at the photo of my crumpled car online, something dropped with me. Something big. It was the realisation that my life had been saved by somebody else, and I didn’t mean the designer of my airbag, or the car’s seat belts. Instead, a higher power had kept me alive. God Almighty.

I took the accident to be a message from above, a sign that I’d been chosen to become The Fastest Man on Earth. My theory was that God needed me to be fit and well so I could follow the path He’d set me all those years ago when I first ran through the forest in Jamaica as a kid. I’d always believed that everything happened for a reason, because my mom had a faith in God. That faith had become more important to me as I’d got older, so in my mind the crash was a message, a warning. A sign that flashed in big, neon lights.

‘Yo, Bolt!’ it said. ‘I’ve given you a cool talent, what with this world-record breaking thing and all, and I’m going to look after you. But you need to take it seriously now. Drive careful. Check yourself.’

You know what? He had a good point. The Man Above had given me a gift and it was now down to me to make the most of it. My eyes had been opened, I had God in my corner, and He had put me on this earth to run – and faster than any athlete, ever.

Now that was pretty cool news.

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I live for big championships, that’s where I come alive. In a normal race I get fired up, I’m eager to win because I’m so damn competitive, but the real desire and passion isn’t there, not fully. It’s only during a major meet that I’m really sharp and determined and have the edge I need to be an Olympic gold medallist or a world record breaker. Psychologically I’m pretty normal the rest of the time.

But give me a big stage, a fight, a challenge, and something happens – I get real. I walk an inch taller, I move a split second faster. I’d probably pop my own hamstrings to win a race. Place a big hurdle in front of me, maybe an Olympic title or an aggressive adversary like the Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake, and I step up – I get hungry.

My school, Waldensia Primary in Sherwood Content, a village in Trelawny, was the scene of my first big challenge. I was eight years old, a gangly kid with way too much energy, and I was always on the lookout for excitement. It’s funny, though I ran around a hell of a lot, my potential on the race track only became an issue once it was spotted by one of my teachers, Mr Devere Nugent, who was a pastor and the school sports freak. I was quick on my feet even then and I loved cricket, but I never thought I could make anything of my speed other than as a bowler. One afternoon, as we played a few overs on the school field, Mr Nugent took me to one side. There was a sports day coming up and he wanted to know if I was competing in the 100 metres event.

I shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

From Grade One in Jamaica, everybody used to play sports and run against one another, but I wasn’t the fastest kid in the school back then. There was another kid at Waldensia called Ricardo Geddes, and he was quicker than me over the shorter sprints. We would run against one another in the street or on the sports field for fun, and while there wasn’t anything riding on our races, my competitive streak meant that I took every single one seriously. Whenever he beat me I always got mad, or I’d cry.

‘Yo, I can’t deal with this!’ I’d moan, often as he took me at the imaginary tape.

The biggest problem for me, even then, was I couldn’t seem to start a sprint quickly enough. It took me for ever to get up from the crouching position. Although I was too young to understand the mechanics of a race, I could tell that my height was a serious disadvantage. It took me longer to come out of the imaginary blocks than a shorter kid. Once I was in my stride I’d always catch up with Ricardo if we were running a longer distance, say 150 metres, but in a 60 metre race I knew there was no chance.

Mr Nugent figured differently.

‘You could be a sprinter,’ he said

I didn’t get it, I shrugged it off.

‘I can see real speed during your bowling run-ups,’ he said. ‘You’re quick, seriously quick.’

I wasn’t convinced. Apart from my races with Ricardo, track and field wasn’t something that had interested me before. My dad, Wellesley, was a cricket nut, and so were all my friends. Naturally, it’s all we talked about. Nobody ever conversed about the 100 metres or the long jump at school, although I could see it was a passion among the older people in Trelawny. All the fun I needed came from taking wickets. Running quick was just a handy tool for taking down batsmen, like my height and strength.

And that’s when Mr Nugent got sneaky. The man bribed me with food.

‘Bolt, if you can beat Ricardo in the school sports day race, I’ll give you a box lunch,’ he said, knowing the true way to a boy’s heart was through his stomach.

Wow, s**t had got serious! A box lunch was The Real Deal, it came packed with juicy jerk chicken, roasted sweet potatoes, rice and peas. Suddenly there was an incentive, a prize. The thought of a reward got me all excited, as did the thrill of stepping up in a big championship. I had come alive on the eve of a superstar meet for the first time. The two top stars in Waldensia Primary were going head to head and nothing was going to stop me from winning.

‘Oh, OK, Mr Nugent,’ I said. ‘If that’s how it is …’

Sports day was a big event at Waldensia, which was a typical rural Jamaican primary school. A row of small, single-storey buildings had been set atop a hill in a clearing in the middle of a stretch of tropical forest. Coconut trees and wild bush surrounded the property; the classrooms had roofs made from corrugated tin and their walls were painted in bright colours – pink, blue and yellow. There was a sports field with some goalposts, a cricket pitch and a running track, which was a bumpy stretch of grass, with lanes marked out with black lines that had been scorched into the ground with burning gasoline. At the finishing line was a shack. On the day of the race it looked to me as if the entire school had lined the lanes in support.

My heart was beating fast, my head was telling me that this was an event as big as any Olympic final. But when Mr Nugent shouted Go! something crazy happened. I got up quick and flew down that track, pushed on by the excitement of competing in a championship for the first time. At first I could hear Ricardo behind me. He was breathing hard, but I couldn’t see him out of the corner of my eye and I knew from our street races that was a good sign. As the metres flashed by, I couldn’t even hear him, which was even better news. My longer strides had taken me into a comfortable lead, and over 100 metres I was out of sight. Ricardo was nowhere near me. By the time I’d busted the tape I was miles ahead, it was over. I’d taken my first major race.

Bang! Winning was like an explosion, a rush. Joy, freedom, fun – it hit me all at once. Taking the line first felt great, especially in something as big as a school sports day race, an event that officially made me the fastest kid in Waldensia. For the first time, the buzz of serious competition had forced me to step up. World records and gold medals were a long way off, but my race against Ricardo had been a push towards getting real in track and field. I was a champ, and as I tumbled to the ground at the end of the lanes I knew one thing: being Number One felt pretty good.

***

There’s an old photo at home that makes me laugh whenever I see it. It’s of me as a kid. I’m maybe seven years old, and I’m standing in the street alongside my mom, Jennifer. Even then I was nearly shoulder high against her. I’m looking ‘silk’ in skinny black jeans and a red T-shirt. I’m clutching Mom’s hand tight, leaning in close, and the look on my face says, ‘To get to me you’ve gotta get through her first.’ It’s a happy time, a happy place.

I was a mommy’s boy back then, still am, and the only time I ever cry today is when something makes my mom sad. I hate to see her upset. Me and Pops were close, I love him dearly, but Mom and me had a special bond, probably because I was her only child and she spoilt me rotten.

Home was Coxeath, a small village near Waldensia Primary and Sherwood Content and, man, it was beautiful, a village among the lush trees and wild bush. Not a huge amount of people lived in the area; there was a house or two every few hundred metres and our old home was a simple, single-storey building rented by Dad. The pace of life was slow, real slow. Cars rarely passed through and the road was always empty. The closest thing to a traffic jam in Coxeath took place when a friend waved out in the street.

To give an idea of how remote it was, back in the day they named the whole area Cockpit Country because it was once a defensive stronghold in Jamaica used by Maroons, the runaway West Indian slaves that had settled there during the 1700s. The Maroons used the area as a base and would attack the English forts during colonial times. If their lives hadn’t been so violent, Coxeath and Sherwood Content would have been a pretty blissful place. The weather was always beautiful, the sun was hot, and even if the sky turned slightly grey, it was a tranquil spot. I remember we called the rain ‘liquid sunshine’.

Despite the climate, tourists rarely swung by, and anyone reading a guidebook would see the same thing in their travel directions: ‘Yo, you can only get there by car and the drive is pretty scary. The road winds through some heavy vegetation over a track full of potholes. On one side there’s a fast-flowing river; trees and jungle hangs down from the other and a crazy-assed chicken might run out on you at any time, so watch your step. About 30 minutes along the way is Coxeath, a small village set in the valley …’ It’s worth the effort, though. That place is my paradise.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the way I lived when I was young had everything to do with how I came to be an Olympic legend. There was adventure everywhere, even in my own house, and from the minute I could walk I was tearing about the home, because I was the most hyperactive kid ever. Not that anyone would have imagined that happening when I was born because, man, I came out big – nine and a half pounds big. I was such a weight that Pops later told me one of the nurses in the hospital had even made a joke about my bulk when I’d arrived.