On This Day: Usain Bolt cements legacy with 2nd world record in 4 days
It is 12 years to the day since Usain Bolt broke his own men’s 200m world record in thrilling style.
On 20 August, 2009, the Jamaican sprinter ran 19.19 seconds over the distance in the final of the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany.
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He knocked 11 hundredths of a second off his own previous world record.
The run was all the more impressive given one of the other runners, Frenchman David Alerte, made a false start, forcing Bolt and the rest of the field to reset.
When the race did get underway, Bolt was electric, posting the quickest reaction time out of the blocks and making the result a formality by the time he had ran the bend.
Not content with breaking the 100m world record at the same championships four days earlier (with a time of 9.58 seconds, a record that still stands today), Bolt kept going until the line.
His initial time was recorded as 19.20, but this was soon revised down to 19.19.
Bolt did not have the ideal preparation going into the championships, having injured his leg in a car crash that April. The injury prevented him from running the 200m bend in training for several weeks.
Bolt received a $100,000 bonus for breaking the 200m world record.
Afterwards, Bolt said: “I keep telling people that my main aim is to become a legend.
“That’s the aim for me and that’s what I’m working on.
“It’s just a great feeling for me to have broken my world record. I didn’t know I was going to break it that bad. I was just trying my heart out and I got it right so I’m just happy.
“I don’t know what is the limit for 200m. Anything is possible – I doubt people thought I would run 19.19. I didn’t think I would run 19.19.”
However, 19.19 has proved to be the limit, with the record standing for the past 12 years. And he did it all on the day before his 23rd birthday.
That 200m made Bolt the first man to break both the 100m and 200m world records more than once.
His 0.62 second margin of victory was more than the sum total of winning margins of the five previous winners of the title combined.
By this point, Bolt had already won double gold for the 100m and 200m at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
In the 200m there, Bolt set a new world record of 19.30 seconds, breaking the long-standing time set by American Michael Johnson at the Atlanta Games in 1996 of 19.32 seconds.
Bolt would go on to repeat the gold sprint double at both London 2012 and Rio 2016.
The closest anyone else has come to his 200m world record was his Jamaican compatriot Yohan Blake, who ran 19.26 in Brussels in September 2011.
