Usain Bolt seven opponents reacted faster than he did in Rio Akani Simbine rank 1

Bolt’s false start at the 2011 world championships. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Usain Bolt’s reaction time out of the starting blocks in the 100-meter final in Rio was 0.155 of a second. Try to beat it. Turn up your volume.


If you’re upset that this competition is unfair, well, you may be right. Usain Bolt is the world’s fastest man. You, on the other hand, are just ears and a thumb as far as this quiz is concerned. But if there were a (short) list of speed-related things you could beat Usain Bolt at, his reaction time would be near the top.


In the 100-meter final in Rio on Sunday night, six of Bolt’s seven opponents reacted faster than he did:

NAME	COUNTRY	REACTION TIME	REACTION RANK	FINAL TIME	FINAL PLACE
Akani Simbine	South Africa	0.128	1	9.94	5
Trayvon Bromell	United States	0.135	2	10.06	8
Jimmy Vicaut	France	0.140	3	10.04	7
Andre de Grasse	Canada	0.141	4	9.91	3
Yohan Blake	Jamaica	0.145	5	9.93	4
Justin Gatlin	United States	0.152	6	9.89	2
Usain Bolt	Jamaica	0.155	7	9.81	1
Ben Youssef Meite	Ivory Coast	0.156	8	9.96	6

But being faster out of the blocks wasn’t enough for those athletes: Bolt still won by eight hundredths of a second.

Guessing when the starting gun is going to fire won’t help you either. Any reaction time less than one-tenth of a second is considered a false start, and there are no second chances. In 2011, Bolt had a false start at the world championships and was immediately disqualified, a blemish on his otherwise perfect run of world championship golds from 2009 to 2015.

That disqualification meant Bolt couldn’t defend his gold medal performance from 2009 in Berlin, when he set the world record, finishing in a blistering 9.58 seconds. With Bolt disqualified, Yohan Blake, a fellow Jamaican, took Bolt’s place atop the podium.

Source: nytimes