The 2025 World Athletics Championships begins this weekend. Will somebody be able to set a new world record in 100m? Unlikely, as the record has been unbeaten since 2009, when Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history, ran 100 meters in 9.69 seconds, beating his own world record from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Bolt, 39 years old, retired in 2017, and will attend the 2025 World Athletics Championships, maybe presenting medals. In an event in Tokyo before the championships, he revealed that he thinks he would have run faster if he had had better spikes.
It comes after a research by Puma, his sponsor, that predicted that Bolt would have made it in 9.42 seconds with the newer shoes. It may be a commercial stunt, but Bolt had already thought about it.
"Someone who continued after I retired was Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce and I saw what she did - she got faster with the spikes", Bolt explained (via Reuters). "I probably would have run way faster if I'd continued and if I knew that spikes would have got to that level maybe I would have, because it would have been great to compete at that level and running that fast."
Tokyo's will be the first senior World Championship for "the new Usain Bolt"
Usain Bolt's record has stood longer than Jim Hine's 9.95 in 1968 (unbroken for 14 years). There's young competition, with an Australian teenager that Bolt himself described as "a younger me".
Do you think Gout Gout can become the new Usain Bolt?