Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet, opened up about his personal life in an interview he gave to The Telegraph last month. In what comes as a shocking confession, the sprinter said that he was never interested in sprinting and instead he used to love watching cricket and football during his childhood days. The 30-year-old also expressed that he had never imagined he would turn out to be a world-class sprinter.
There have been many incidents in the past where the sprinter has jokingly talked about joining Manchester United as a football player. He has also been seen playing cricket alongside his Jamaica teammates in the domestic cricket level in the Carribean. The ‘triple-triple’ winner was also seen playing the gentlemen’s game with Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh as part of his campaign for sportswear brand Puma.
The sprinter had grown up in the village of Sherwood Content in Jamaica, where he used to study at the Waldensia Primary School. He first took to the track in that school, but the track was not a proper one – it was a part of a large field, which had been marked by black lines serving as lanes. Bolt recalled, “Yeah, that’s where it all started for me. That’s where we had our sports day, and it was really small.”
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The sprinter also talked about what was in his mind when he ran his first race. He said, “I was thinking about winning.” But the most important thing that Bolt recalled from his childhood was that he had no interest in running. He used to love playing football and cricket and revealed that his hero was Pakistan’s bowling great Waqar Younis.
The sprinter said, “I was so in love with cricket I didn’t want to do anything else. Track was just something I was doing because I was good at it, and because I was winning it was, ‘You should do this.’ So, alright…”
Lorna Thorpe was the head of sport at the William Knibb Memorial High School in the town of Falmouth where all the primary schools would gather in Trelawny. Thorpe told The Telegraph, “You could see this tall young boy – just raw natural talent. The principal at the time decided to give him a scholarship because we didn’t want to lose him.”
Bolt refers to Thorpe as ‘his second mother’, and the latter also recalled that Bolt’s love for cricket and football was such that they had to frequently send someone to fetch the sprinter. She said, “We’d always say, leave the football alone, man; you’ve got a gold mine in your legs!”
She also remembered that Bolt lost his only race when he was 13 and competing in the national school championships in Kingston. The athlete was staying at a hotel near the stadium. She said, “He was in the 200m finals. When he looked at the time he realised that the race was about to start. He ran straight from where we were staying, across the road, into the stadium, and to the starting line, and set off on the race. He’d been running for too long, and because of that, he didn’t win. That’s the only race I ever saw him lose.”
The 11-time World Champion started his sprinting career at the 2002 World Junior Championships in Jamaica where he won the 200m event, which made him the youngest ever world-junior gold medallist at the age of 15. He received the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Rising Star Award in the same year for his efforts.
But the sprinter admits that he had taken his career for granted in the initial stages of his journey. He said, “The first three years of my senior career it was like, whatever – I didn’t really care, I was just running.”
But Bolt added that training with a new coach in Glen Mills changed everything. He said, “He (Mills) said, ‘Listen, you need to get serious. You can’t be an Olympic champion and not train hard.’ And I started listening and understanding what he was saying. That’s when I started making goals for myself and working towards being the best.”
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It was the 2008 Beijing Olympics which made Bolt the global star he is today. The sprinter won three gold medals at the Games in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m events, which instantly transformed him into the best sprinter in the world. His world record timing of 9.69 seconds in the 100m event saw him getting crowned with the title of the “fastest man on the planet”. Bolt then re-wrote history when he won the three medals again at both the London 2012 Olympics and the Rio 2016 Olympics.
So what would the man want after having won the triple-triple? Bolt said, “What I always wanted...was to be great. For me, it (greatness) means being remembered. People talk about sports all the time, and I want to be a part of that conversation, you know what I mean? When they talk about greats it’s always Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Pelé. I want to be a part of that conversation so when they talk about the greats they say Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Pelé, Usain Bolt.”
Bolt also expressed his desire for the world to never forget him, even when he’s not competing. He said, “Yeah, but I’m still running. I’m still fresh in their mind. I want that when I retire I’m so great that you can’t forget me because you can never forget what Ali and all these guys have done. They have really stamped their mark on history. That’s what I want to do, and I think this Olympics will help me to do that. People tell me, you’re a legend… Yeah, but this Olympics will do it.”
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