Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography

‘Nah, it’s not for me,’ I thought. ‘I hate Spanish.’† (#ulink_c435021c-791b-54a4-918a-79fb440efcfd)

Dad’s problems with my slack attitude were the annual, supplementary tuition payments he had to make to the school. He knew that if I failed a year I’d have to repeat it, and that meant an extra bunch of school bills. He got mad again. It was whoop-ass time.

‘If you get held back, Bolt, that’s it!’ he shouted one evening. ‘Anything can happen in track and field – you could be injured and never run as quickly again. If you haven’t got something in your head to fall back on there won’t be anything to help you later on in life.’

To focus me even more, Dad took to getting me up at half past five in the morning. It was crazy. School didn’t start until 8.30, but he wanted me up at the crack of dawn. I would moan every time the alarm went off.

‘What is this?’ he would shout, if ever I stayed in bed. ‘Boy, why are you so lazy?’

Luckily, Mom was a lot softer. As soon as Pops had left for work she would let me go back to sleep. To make sure I wasn’t late for lessons, Mom would then call me a cab to school.

***

Although I didn’t know it at the time, my lazy attitude to training was affecting those all-important competitive performances. Hands down I was the best runner at William Knibb, but when it came to the Regional Championships, I was forever getting my ass kicked by a kid called Keith Spence from Cornwall College. And that pissed me off.

Spence was a mixed-race Jamaican boy and he was pumped up with muscle. The one thing we’d heard about him at school was that his dad had pushed him hard, and I later learned he would make Keith go to the gym all the time. But the extra work had given him an advantage over me because he was more developed, more ripped than I was, even though we were both only 13. His strong abs gave him extra power on the track and I could not take him at the line, no matter how hard I tried. Because I hadn’t bothered with the gym work, because I’d skipped too many of Mr Barnett’s sit-up sessions, I had fallen behind the competition.

But losing to Keith Spence was just as painful to me as those 700 stomach crunches, so after yet another defeat at a regional track meet in 2000, I decided enough was enough. I got furious, and the annoyance gave me focus. Like my race with Ricardo Geddes and Mr Nugent’s promise of the box lunch, I had a goal. I wanted to beat that kid, even if it broke me.

‘Nah, Keith Spence,’ I said to myself on the way home. ‘It’s not going to happen next time.’

It was another big challenge, I had another major adversary, and it was time to step up. I started training a little bit harder, I worked and worked during the school summer break, and as I got more and more into practice, something special happened. I caught my first glimpse of the Olympics when someone showed me some video footage of the 1996 Atlanta Games.

That clip blew my mind. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen, firstly because watching any kind of Olympic sport was a rarity in Jamaica. We just didn’t have the technology or finances to screen top sporting events at the turn of the 21st century. If a Kingston TV company wanted to screen the Games live back in the day, it would have cost them huge amounts of money. There was no satellite or cable TV in Sherwood Content either. To get a clear picture from abroad we needed a pole and dish to pick up a decent reception. It wasn’t like we turned the box on and an ESPN or Sky Sports picture came to life like it does now. Watching TV took some serious effort, so catching any form of track and field was a big deal for me.

That first glimpse was also important because I could see how popular the 100 metres was, and the 200 metres, the 400 metres, even the damn 800 metres, and all over the world too, not just in Jamaica. It was much bigger than the inter-schools and parish champs I’d been involved in. Even the 30,000 strong crowd at Champs looked small in comparison. I could tell that the Olympics was huge everywhere. Up until that moment I hadn’t known just how big sprinting was around the world.

But the most wonderful part of watching those old Games was seeing Michael Johnson for the first time, an athlete running the 200 metres and 400 metres, my events. Even better, he won golds in both and broke the 200 world record with a time of 19.32 seconds. Now that was exciting, but the main thing I noticed as I watched him running around the track to first place was that his back was so upright, his head stared straight down the lane. It was weird to see a guy run like that.

I could not for the life of me work out how he was doing it. Johnson seemed so smooth, he made his races look too easy. Even when he was tiring towards the end of the 400 metres final – the seconds when his muscles were probably burning up – every part of his body was upright. As he crossed the line in first place, I remember thinking: ‘Man, I want to be somebody like Michael Johnson. I want to be an Olympic gold medallist.’ It was the first time the thought had ever crossed my mind.

That was bad news for Keith Spence. The next time I went to training I tried to copy Johnson’s style. I came out of the blocks and pushed my body into the same rigid, upright position, but it hurt my back real bad, so I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. I wasn’t deterred from learning, though, and to improve more I watched videos, old footage, documentaries that told me about the history of the Olympics and the great Jamaican athletes, like the 400 metre runner Herb McKenley and the 400 and 800 metre runner Arthur Wint, who became the country’s first Olympic gold medallist in 1948.

Then a coach showed me a videotape of Don Quarrie, the Jamaican who won the gold medal in the 200 metres at the 1976 Montreal Games. Now, if I’d thought Michael Johnson was smooth when he raced, Don Quarrie made him look like a robot. That man took the corner so gracefully that it was almost an art form to me. Straightaway I had to perfect that aspect of my race, and the next time I practised I started emulating him on the corner.

It was clear from watching those old athletes that I still had to learn a lot about running the 200 metres. There was a lot of technical stuff to get into my head once I’d left the blocks, especially as I was a tall guy. Ideally, a sprinter should run the curve on the track as close to the line as possible, because it’s the most effective way of racing over 200 or 400 metres. The runner travels less distance that way, a bit like Lewis Hamilton cutting off the corner in Formula One racing.

For Quarrie, running tight on the 200 metre curve on a track was easier because he was small. He had a low centre of gravity. That meant he could control his shorter strides with ease. He wasn’t going to move around in his lane too much and lose time. I couldn’t do that, I was too tall. You bet I tried, but as soon as I picked up speed, my longer legs took me wide because I had less control.

In an attempt to get over the problem, I spent hours practising that racing line, and what I quickly realised was that I would have to run the first 50 metres of a 200 metres race in the middle of the lane. Once that was done, just as I’d hit top speed, I could drift closer to the inside line to run the corner more effectively. Then I would be around the turn and firing towards the finishing line like a slingshot, and I could get back into the middle of the lane. Well, that was the theory anyway. It didn’t always work out in practical terms.

All of a sudden, I was psyched by the 200 metres. Losing to Keith Spence had been the inspiration behind that process, and over the following year I began improving on my running technique. But there was also another very important boost to my ability: I had grown again. I was 14 years of age by the time it came to the regional champs a year later and I was six feet two in height. My stride was seriously long, too. When we lined up again in the 200, Keith Spence had nothing on me. He looked as bad as ever, he was ripped. But I was taller, sharper and much, much faster on the corner than before.

Bang! The gun fired. Because of Spence’s muscles he burst out of the blocks real fast, but once I’d taken the corner, he couldn’t keep up. I came off the curve with strength, I had started out in the middle of the lane and maintained a smooth rhythm. As I hit top speed I drifted over. My steps were tight to the line and when I hit the straight, every stride pushed me further and further away from my rival. I peeked over my shoulder. The kid was struggling to keep up.

By the time I’d crossed the line, I was out of sight. ‘Yo, I got him!’

I guess that was the moment of big discovery for me. I had to run the 200 metres in an effective style. But I’d created a mantra that would define my mental attitude towards opponents for the rest of my career. If I beat you in a big meet, you’re not going to beat me again. From that moment, I knew that once I’d taken a tough athlete for the first time, that was it. I had superiority and the confidence to win, again and again. It was a psychological stepping stone, and the realisation that gave me the mindset of a true champ.

I realised that, yeah, a runner could beat me in a one-off meet, a small event, but in a big championships, like my first ever school race at Waldensia, or the regional champs, it wasn’t going to happen – end of story. I had proven it with Ricardo Geddes, and now Keith Spence. I’d pushed on, and winning was now a serious habit.

* (#ulink_aa2919c6-bd18-5001-a040-4b08c41a82ff) My successes were so regular that Miss Lee later arranged for the school sports day to take place when she knew I would be away at international competition – just to give the other a kids a chance.

† (#ulink_235bafd0-bc3a-5fae-938a-8312bb780e57) Damn, if only I’d listened. Over the last few years I’ve met some of those Spanish girls and a lot of them were seriously beautiful. The only problem was that I couldn’t converse with any of them at the time – in a club, at a party – because I didn’t speak the language. Miss Jackson had been right. I later became so vexed about the situation that I went out and bought the language computer program, Rosetta Stone, just so I could pick up a few phrases. I didn’t take too much away from it, but enough to know that anything sounds romantic in French and Spanish, but German is another story.

(#u9b31ec99-4f01-54b6-94c7-f62b95cce3a2)

I stepped up again and again. Junior rivals fell like dominoes, and after Keith Spence I hit a winning streak at Jamaica’s regional level – I was hot. But despite my successes, track and field just seemed like a whole load of fun to me, nothing more.

That laid-back way of thinking was the perfect mindset for an athlete: I was relaxed before every race, I felt chilled about my performances; I didn’t get freaked out by tough events where the field was seriously strong. And I definitely didn’t stress about racing, not like some of the other kids did. They got nervous before their starts, they obsessed about smashing their personal bests. I had a champion’s confidence because I was so relaxed.

Following my victory over Spence, I worked harder in training, but not that much harder. Raw talent was still all I needed to win most races, but I upped my game a little. Sure, there were times when I’d skip training, and as soon as my absence was noticed, Coach McNeil would find me. He would cuss and lecture me as my ass was hauled back to school, but once our work had started at the track, I’d run nearly every lap on his training schedule.

Sometimes hard work wasn’t enough, though. Take Champs at the National Stadium in Kingston for example. When I qualified for my first appearance in 2001 at the age of 14, no running session in the world could have prepared me for that, because it was big, seriously big. I arrived at the event for the first time and my mind blew. The National Stadium was wild, a bowl-shaped arena with a track sunk into the ground and ringed by one vast stand which overflowed with people. It was built for serious competition, and I felt like a serious athlete.

Inside, it was just as I’d imagined from seeing it on the TV and reading about it in the newspapers. The fans were rowdy, everyone was going nuts. It was like being in a big South American football ground, where the supporters were ridiculously passionate. Before each race, as the runners stepped on to the lanes, kids from every school screamed at the top of their lungs and it was impossible to hear anything. I walked into that stadium for my first 200 metres heat and I got a rush from the noise. People banged on drums and played trumpets. The energy it brought to the arena gave me tingles. In that moment, Champs seemed like my Superbowl, Champions League final and Olympic Games rolled into one.

I was racing in Class Two, which was an under-16 event.* (#ulink_81941d51-0849-5efb-95ed-696d01e099db) That meant I was one of the youngest competitors on the start line, and at that age one or two years could sometimes be quite a disadvantage in terms of physical power and technical ability. I didn’t let it faze me, I was there for the buzz, though anyone looking at the line-up would have thought I was the oldest in the race – I could see over the heads of every rival in the lanes.

A cool head was important at an event like Champs because stress could be a big thing for a lot of high-school athletes. School pride and prestige meant that there was some serious pressure to do well in the competition. A lot of hype was attached to being the school with the best track and field programme in Jamaica, so everybody upped their game. The standard was high. My A-race was going to be needed if William Knibb were to have chance of winning anything.

The competition worked on a team points system, and individual results were combined to determine an overall score, so my contribution would be vital. But there was individual pressure, too. The teachers at William Knibb kept talking about how Champs had been a springboard for success for some of the great Jamaican stars. Don Quarrie, Herb McKenley and the 100 and 200 metre runner Merlene Ottey had all done well at Champs before going on to the world stage. Then there was the promise of a future beyond school: any junior stars of school-leaving age could expect the offer of an athletics scholarship in America, should they shine in the Kingston National Stadium; the younger kids might find their cards marked for future selection.

I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. My excitement was focused solely on the track, the stadium and the fans. But despite my age and inexperience of handling big crowds, there weren’t any nerves, there was no fear. In the 200, I cruised through my heats, into the final and I was hyped – it felt like just another championship meet to me. Bang! When I got out of the blocks, I tore past nearly all of the field, taking a silver medal with a time of 22.04 seconds. The William Knibb fans in the stands went crazy. The whole crowd seemed to be going crazy. It was wild.

With one race, I was on the map. With my second, I was the focus of the country’s athletics fans. I was due to race Jermaine Gonzales† (#ulink_4a5c20d2-6c87-5c4a-a4ea-01cf79f32851) in the 400 metres final, a powerhouse sprinter. Whenever he ran he became a crazy-assed whirlwind of limbs and braided hair. Jermaine was the defending national champ at that time and I knew the cat had game, but I’d also realised there wasn’t a lot between me and him in terms of times, so I’d need to beat him by using brains rather than pure speed in our next 400 metres race.

In recent months I had developed a tactical edge. Like a football coach, I had started planning strategies before meets. As I battled the top kids in Jamaican athletics, I realised that to win I needed to act smart sometimes, so in competitions I found my rivals’ strengths and weaknesses. I watched them in the heats to understand their styles of running and how they attacked a race. Often my first move in any championships was to work out whether I needed to change my game to deal with a strong opponent. Most of the time I knew I’d be quick enough to win on talent alone, but sometimes I used strategy to get to the line in first place.

A week before Champs, NJ and me had sat in the school library to chat tactics. The pair of us had gone to William Knibb together, and while I’d excelled in the brawn department, NJ had been training his mind – he was an A-grade student. But he also understood the art of track and field, he was a sports nut like me, and while the other kids hunched over their books and scribbled into their pads, NJ dissected Jermaine’s sprinting style. We were whispering like spies planning an undercover attack.

‘I know he’s good over 400,’ said NJ. ‘As good as you, but I think you’re the faster 200 metre runner.’

I nodded. ‘OK … And?’

‘VJ, if you attack the first corner hard, and the first half of the 400 too, it’ll psyche him out, especially if you come out of the blocks at the front of the pack. Your good start might panic Jermaine, knock him off his rhythm and force him into over-stretching. That’s when you can take the race, because he’ll lose his technique and you can cruise home.’

At the next championships I stuck to NJ’s tactics and Pow! when the gun popped I moved away from the start line as hard as I could. I was five metres ahead of Jermaine at the corner and as he pushed himself in a desperate attempt to catch up, I heard him cry out. Like NJ predicted, he had panicked, he’d overstretched and pulled a hamstring. All I had to do was burn down the home stretch to first place.

NJ and I felt like masterminds. We later heard that Jermaine had been carrying an injury, but I knew that my attitude to race tactics had helped me to step up. It was a serious learning curve. Afterwards, people talked me up as a contender, a star for the future, and my results in Champs meant that I was eligible to represent Jamaica in the 2001 CARIFTA Games in Barbados. This was a junior competition organised by the Caribbean Free Trade Association every year and held all over the islands in places such as Trinidad and Tobago and Bermuda.

Talk about changing the game. CARIFTA was a competition where the best of the Caribbean junior athletes got together. It was also my first shot at representing the country. But even though I was pulling on a Jamaica running vest in an international event, I still didn’t think anything spectacular was happening. CARIFTA was just another race to me, and I took silver in the 200 metres and set a personal best of 48.28 seconds in the 400.

It was all adventure. Flying to Barbados was the first time I had left Jamaica and, for a while, it felt like a holiday. Then I got homesick and started to miss Mom. One night, as I tried to sleep, I even began crying because I wanted to go home. Back then, I hated the idea of being away from Jamaica for too long. But the Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA, or the Jay-3-As), saw beyond my immaturity and developed a more serious game plan. They had seen some potential in my running style and times, and shortly after Barbados they selected me again, this time to wear Jamaican colours in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Youth Championships in Debrecen, Hungary, and that’s when I damn well nearly freaked out.

‘Hungary? Are you kidding me?’ I thought when I heard the news. ‘Where the hell is that place?’

There was a lot of head scratching going on when I looked at the world map at home. It took me ages to find Hungary, and when I finally saw it somewhere in the middle of Europe, Debrecen looked just about the farthest place away from Jamaica. And man, talk about a journey! First we flew to London and got a bus from one airport to another, then we flew to Hungary and drove out to The Middle of Nowhere. Our trip seemed to go on for ever.