Tom Brady joining the announcing booth, Lebron James’s son getting drafted, and Katie Ledecky’s continued dominance at the Olympic stage are all examples of recent news about greatest of all-time (GOAT) athletes in their respective sports. But as these figures continue to pepper into media stories, let us not forget the greatest athlete of all—the sprinter Usain Bolt.
I award Bolt such designation because he aces the following criteria: strength of competition, unparalleled dominance, and longevity of records. In most sports, the GOAT is up for debate. How does one compare Michael Jordan’s reign of the physically-brutal 90’s basketball era to Lebron ‘King’ James’s record-breaking career in the better-conditioned, higher-efficiency, three-point shooting of the current NBA? What strengthens Bolt’s case is the objective timing in track races, which easily allows comparison across generations and emphasizes his superiority in these three criteria.
Humans have run for over 2 million years, making it the oldest human sport. There are no cost barriers to entry unlike Hockey, Football, Baseball, or other equipment-aided competitions. And, an estimated 620 million people actively run around the world. This accessibility makes running among the most challenging to make it to the highest-level. Sprinting races—widely regarded as the most exciting—are even more competitive.
But what if the early 2000s just lacked strong sprinters? Nope! Bolt faced the best slate of sprinters the sport has ever seen. The top-5 fastest 100 meters runners of all-time raced when Bolt was competing. And—it is important to note—every one of those five (except for Bolt) has been caught doping in their careers.
Even with this enhanced competition, the top spot was never in question. Bolt won three-straight Olympic 100m and 200m races and 11 World Championship gold medals. Even more impressive than the sum of his trophies are his individual world records. In 2009, Bolt’s performance was sublime. In this year, Bolt ran a record 9.58 in the 100m and 19.19 in the 200m, vastly distancing himself from the rest of the field. The next closest times are multiple tenths of a second behind, which is a huge fraction in such short races—even more so if you remove the athletes who have been caught doping.
But 2009 was 15 years ago; surely his records have been beaten since? Another nope! In recent years, we have seen a revolution in running technology and training. A leader in this wave, Nike, for instance, has developed ‘super shoes.’ Fitted with carbon fiber plates, they return more energy to runners on every step than ever before. Bolt himself has been a skeptic of these shoes, “It’s weird and unfair for a lot of athletes because I know that in the past they [shoe companies] actually tried and the governing body said ‘no, you can’t change the spikes’, so to know that now they are actually doing it, it’s laughable,” Bold said. But even though these shoes promise to break Bolt’s records, it seems that current sprinters are getting further from breaking his times. 2024 100m Olympic Champion Noah Lyles ran a 9.79—a time Bolt routinely jogged in pre-final heats.
The records of other retired decorated athletes, such as the 23-time Olympic gold medalist, Michael Phelps, have not been able to beat modern training regimens. For example, zero of Phelps’s individual time records still stand.
And what’s crazy is that Bolt could have been even faster. Many consider Bolt—who grew up with a limited supply of clean water, did not run his first official 100m race until he was 21, and is famous for an unideal diet consisting of 1000 McDonald’s chicken nuggets at the 2008 Olympics—to have never reached his full potential.
Standing at six feet five inches, Bolt is a true unicorn. In a 100m race he only needed 41 strides compared to the elite average of 45. No other athlete faced as strong competition or was objectively as dominant. Though the longevity of Bolt’s records, and how sprinters have only run slower times over the years, is the most impressive. It is entirely possible we do not see Bolt’s records broken in our lifetimes—but for entertainment’s sake, I hope we do. Until then, and maybe even if, that day arises, I will continue to view Bolt as the GOAT.