Best Pure Sprinter Ever

gorney wrote:

Casey Combest puts all the others to shame.

Would love to see his splits in his 6.56. He was def a pure sprinter...started losing ground very quickly after his crazy fast starts. Shame he never was able to develop that talent further.

I have never even heard of Casey Combest.

6.56 doesn't seem to put him anywhere near this league, but I'd love to hear more about him.

White Lightning wrote:

I have never even heard of Casey Combest.

6.56 doesn't seem to put him anywhere near this league, but I'd love to hear more about him.

High school kid. White guy.

I just saw video of Casey Combest's 6.57 HS time.

Great, but there have been other young kids doing very fast 60 times--Nicolas Macrozonaris, for one.

Macrozonaris is white as well, by the way.

As an aside, do white guys lose the 100m more in the second half of the race than in the first? There seem to be some very fast 60m white guys who never amount to anything in the 100m.

Like me! Well, I USED to be fast, sort of. OK, not really.

Greene is totally overrated and dominated during a really crappy era for sprinting. Also, his friend and training partner, the much more talented Ato Boldon, basically let him win.

The Gay/Bolt era we are in right now is great just like the 80s and early 90s and shows up just how rubbish the Greene and Gatlin years were.

You know, Boldon might actually be able to compete as a "pure sprinter".

Any idea what his 50 or 60 times were?

I don't know if the Greene/Gatlin years were rubbish, but they certainly seem unfortunate--like a dull intermission between interesting eras. There were a bunch of guys who could go fast--Greene, Bailey, Surin, Boldon, Fredricks, Christie, to name a few--but they were all about equally fast, with nobody having standout performances. And no real personalities, except for Greene, whose personality just came off as a sort of a-hole. (remember the 4x100m debacle?)

Or so it seemed to me. Certainly nothing like Lewis/Johnson or Bolt/Gay/Powell. I agree that Greene is over-rated, but he did seem to be a good racer.

gorney wrote:

Casey Combest puts all the others to shame.

Nice! There's a name from the past.... Kentucky's finest, for sure.

Fastest 5'5", 125 lb, white boy ever. I saw him race against a bunch of "classic" sprint types once at a Nike Ohio St. Indoor meet once (read: brothers, 6'+, and chiseled).

Combest was bouncing on both legs at the starting line. Up and down, up and down. Had to be bouncing 3 feet each time. Hops. Springs. Crazy.

Turnover like mad. Combest blew everyone off the line and won the 60 (or maybe 55?) by a good 10 meters. Never seen anything like it in my life.

That is, until I saw Alan Webb run 4:12 as a soph indoors just an hour or so after Combest's run...

Combest article in SI. '99.

YES... espn. gotta love them... here's the video of Combest's run at Ohio St. The hops, like I said. Watch the pre-race hops. Awesome.

Man... he's all Kentucky though, isn't he? He looks like the guys who mow the yards around my neighborhood.

http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=3529842&categoryid=null

Ben Johnson comes to mind when I saw the High School 60 meter record video. However, Casey would have had to maintain his speed with supplements and maintain his turnover rate. That and power lifting probably would have made him a top world class sprinter. Unfortunately no sponsors seemed to have acquired the least bit of interest in this fellow when he was young. Houston McTear also had great acceleration... Combest was pretty incredible for 60 yards though.

[quote]Kentucy oughta be proud wrote:

YES... espn. gotta love them... here's the video of Combest's run at Ohio St. The hops, like I said. Watch the pre-race hops. Awesome.

Man... he's all Kentucky though, isn't he? He looks like the guys who mow the yards around my neighborhood.

[\quote]

you saying he never left your neighborhood? What happenned to him?

Did you ever hear of Bob Hayes??

Are you guys f***ing serious right now? I bet you'd also say Paavo Nurmi is the best pure distance runner of all time, too. Clearly, clearly, Bolt has far surpassed anything anyone has ever done. He does not have superior sprint endurance, as evidenced by his 200m and 400, but even those show that his top speed, or pure sprint ability far surpass anyone discussed here.