Usain Bolt has taken a jab at the FloTrack podcast which suggested hours before the World Athletics Championships men’s 100m final on Saturday, that his 9.58 world record set in 2009 was about to be broken.
The bold assertion came from Gordon Mack, an analyst on the podcast who proposed American Fred Kerley as the one to break Bolt’s record.
“You may have just 24 hours left of the trump card of Usain Bolt being the world record holder. You may have just 24 hours bragging rights before it gets shifted to the United States because of Fred Kerley,” Gordon said on the podcast on Friday night.
“You guys may have to go watch some of those [Usain Bolt] Youtube videos back a few times tonight, a few times tomorrow morning, because it may become the former world record holder Usain Bolt,” he added.
Gordon’s analysis was based on the 9.79 seconds that Kerley ran in the heats leading up to the final.
The video quickly went viral and left athletics fans on Twitter in bewilderment at his analysis.
And although the 27-year-old Kerley did win the final on Saturday night, it was in a time of 9.86, not even close to any of Bolt’s three 100m records – 9.72, 9.69, and 9.58. Jamaica’s only representative to reach the final on Saturday was Oblique Seville, who ended fourth in 9.97.
After the race, Bolt congratulated Kerley for becoming the new World Champion.
But Sunday morning, Bolt seem to have just gotten wind of FloTrack comments and took to Twitter to silence them.
He replied to Mack’s comment with the iconic photo of himself at the London 2012 Olympics, putting his finger to his lips in a “shhhh” gesture. He captioned the image ‘9.58’, his still-standing world record.
In follow-up tweets, Bolt posited that the advancement of track and field will uplift the standard: “On a real though loving the development of our sport. Improvement in spikes technology… faster tracks… New technology to help athletes maximize their training and better recovery system to aid athletes in their preparation.
“Now let’s further elevate the business of athletics so our athletes can reap even greater benefits of their hard work.”
