Fastest man ever

Carl Lewis would certainly be up there. Even when he was the best 100-meter runner in the world, he was probably better still as the anchor on a 4 X 100 relay team.

Bullet Bob Hayes

Mr Meter wrote:

Would MJ have beaten Baily in the 100 in 96 with a flying start?

Of course!! MJ ran a 9.20 second 100m in his 19.32!

Mo Greene reached a top speed of 27mph during is record run. Not sure if they clocked lil Timmy.

Alan

its the bullet Bob Hayes. 10.06 on cinder lane 1 that was chewed up from the 20k walk which was the event before -- won by 7 meters and TF&N called his performance "insulting to an Olympic field."

Then he obliterated everyone on the 4x100, running 8.8 or 8.9 on cinder . . . and for an encore the NFL had to invent zone defense because he could outsprint everyone on man coverage.

His competitive track career was over at age 23. That's scary.

My other choice was, in fact, "Bullet Bob" Hayes, who has often been credited as the fastest ever. Trying to avoid the criticism that "oldguys" tend to overestimate the achievements of the sports legends of their own childhood, I just mentioned Carl Lewis as a possibility.

Regarding the observation that Johnson ran the second 100 of his 200 WR faster than the 100 WR, one must, of course, keep in mind that the average speed in the first half of the 100 is typically MUCH slower than the average speed in the latter half of the race. I doubt that MJ (whose 200 WR is quite remarkable, even among WRs) could match the top-end speed of King Carl or the Bullet.

I remember reading that Bailey hit around 27+ mph at the '96 Games. Not sure if the person measuring it did so legitimately or just making an educated guess with split times and the like.

About 10 years ago, didn't someone in a Texas College

Invite, possibly UTEP, run a wind aided 9.69

Aldo Boldon?

Look, I know the match race turned out to be a complete disater in 1997, but the fact is Bailey won. People (mainly neive Americans) don't give Donovan Bailey enough credit. The fastest way to get from point A to point B is by way of a straight line. Therefore, the fastest man in the world is the man who can get to point B from point A first. The 100 meter race is the only race in track and field where a question such as this can be answered. In 1996 DONOVAN BAILEY was the fastest man in the World. And about the flying start. I've read that Bailey was clocked at 8.95 on his Anchor leg of the Gold Medal winning Canadian team. Not Dennis Mitchell, not Michael Johnson, nor even King Carl Lewis (in 1996) could have competed with that.

It was either 1996 or 1997 and it was Obadele Thompson of Barbados. He kicked it into "Oba Drive"

Of course!! MJ ran a 9.20 second 100m in his 19.32![/quote]

Bailey split 8.91 in his anchor leg at the '96 Olympics. There is quite a difference between 23 and 27 mph. I'd have to check some numbers, but I believe Bailey in 96 had the fastest 10m split ever. Bob Hayes was before my time, so I can't comment on that, but numberically speaking, Bailey's the fastest.

base-10 wrote:

Of course!! MJ ran a 9.20 second 100m in his 19.32!

Bailey split 8.91 in his anchor leg at the '96 Olympics. There is quite a difference between 23 and 27 mph. I'd have to check some numbers, but I believe Bailey in 96 had the fastest 10m split ever. Bob Hayes was before my time, so I can't comment on that, but numberically speaking, Bailey's the fastest.[/quote]

Carl Lewis has split 8.87.

The question was, could MJ beat Bailey, if Bailey was running a 100m out of the blocks and MJ had a flying start. Judged solely on this, it is logical to say that MJ would beat him, based on his 9.20 on the fly. Regardless of what Bailey has run on anchor(it was 8.95, in Atlanta, by the way), in this hypothetical scenario, he's starting from blocks.

I'm not too certain, but as far as I know Bailey still has the world record for fastest speed reached by a human (27-something mph).

"The question was, could MJ beat Bailey, if Bailey was running a 100m out of the blocks and MJ had a flying start."

I think we interpreted the initial question differently. In any event, you all seem to know the numbers better than I do, so I'll defer to your collective judgment on this one.

The 1982 mexican champion: Speedy Gonzales - 8.96 (at altitude).

My question assumed that both MJ and Baily would start on the fly (equal terms). Johnson would have run faster than 9.2 if he wasn't fatigued by blasting a 100m curve from the blocks before hitting the straight. I figure he can surely run in the sub 9's with Baily and Lewis without the long intro.

Incidently, 8.8 s is only 25 mph. Their fastest 10m would have to be under .83 to hit 27 mph which would happen since they can't hold that speed for a full 100m. I remember T & F News had a split for each 10m of Carl's record in '91 but I do not have the details.

That wind aided time by Thompson was in 1994.

Oba ran 9.69 (5.7mph wind) at the 1996 UTEP Invitational in 1996. It was an Olympic year and he was a junior in at UTEP at the time. The next year he would go on to win the 100/200 double at the NCAA championships. He is still competing and I consider him a threat to medal at in Paris next summer.

ONE TO ONE CHALLENGE OF CHAMPIONS Prognosticators hit stride at conclusions NUMBER CRUNCHING / Statistical methodology runs up against speed curves to find the winner

867 words

29 May 1997

The Globe and Mail

Metro

C2

English

All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights reserved.

Here's a dish of the number soup served up by various statisticians and track experts in considering the Fastest Man question:

-- James Christie, The Globe and Mail: "Bailey goes through the 100 metres in 9.84 and Johnson in 10.12. In full flight, Johnson ran his last 100 metres in 9.2 seconds, but Bailey closed the 4 x 100 Olympic relay in 8.95 seconds. Bailey may fade after 100 metres, but he'll have to hit a brick wall to lose an advantage that size in the last 50 metres."

-- Runner's World, the authoritative U.S. running magazine, noted after the Olympics "Bailey ended the controversy when he anchored Canada's 4 x 100-metre relay team to the gold medal with a split timed at . . . 8.95 seconds."

-- John Rucker wrote to The Globe from the University of Toronto's Department of Human Biology to pooh-pooh references to Johnson's superior average speed in comparisons of the Olympic 200 metres and 100 metres. Johnson averaged 37.267 kilometres an hour in his race and Bailey 36.585 km/h in his event.

"The slowest part of any short-distance race is the first 10 metres. Donovan Bailey would obviously have a lower average speed than Michael Johnson because, in a 100-metre race the first 10 metres account for 10 per cent of the race, where as in a 200-metre race they account for only 5 per cent of the race. . . .

"Technically, the world's fastest man is the person who can achieve the highest instantaneous speed, which would be Bailey, who at one point in his race reached 12.1 metres per second (43.6 kilometres per hour)."

-- Rob Tibshirani, statistician at the U of T's Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics and at the Department of Statistics filed this report on The Globe's Science page: "Two definitions of 'fastest' might be a) the highest maximum speed achieved during a race or b) the quickest time to complete the intermediate distance of 150 metres.

"The most straightforward way to address these questions is through speed curves, giving the runner's speed in metres per second at every instant during the race. To estimate speed curves we need split times -- the time it takes a runner to travel various distances during the race.

"From Swiss Timing [the official timekeeper of the Olympics] I obtained split times for every 10 metres of Mr. Bailey's race. These were measured from a laser device situated 20 metres behind the starting blocks, which bounced beams off the backs of each runner. This device was not used in the 200-metre race, so I needed to obtain the data some other way.

"I had videotaped both races, along with the 110-metre hurdles race. Using the positioning of the hurdles, I established landmarks on the infield whose distance from the start I could determine.

"Then by watching a video of the races in slow motion, with the race clock on the screen, I estimated the time it took both Mr. Bailey and Mr. Johnson to reach each of these markings. . . . Using these split times, I developed a curve-fitting procedure to produce the estimated speed curves. If Mr. Johnson's speed curve always lay above Mr. Bailey's, then this analysis would provide convincing evidence in favour of Mr. Johnson, since he achieved his speed despite having already run 100 metres.

"However, Mr. Bailey's curve does rise above Mr. Johnson's, and he achieves a higher maximum speed. Taking into account the uncertainty in the estimated times of these results, I found that the maximum speeds were not statistically different at the 95-per-cent level of confidence. This comparison does not permit a definitive conclusion.

"We turn to the second method: Who would win a race of 150 metres? We could try to extrapolate Mr. Bailey's speed curve out to 150 metres.

However, at the 100-metre mark Mr. Bailey was slowing down and we have no way of knowing what speed he could have maintained for another 50 metres."

Thus, Tibshirani applied a well-known model of sprinting.

"I found an interesting model developed by Professor Joseph Keller of Stanford University in California in 1974. Prof. Keller's model predicts the speed of a sprinter as a function of two parameters for that runner: the force he applies and the resistance he encounters. I fit his model to the speed curves for Mr. Bailey and Mr. Johnson, finding the values for force and resistance that best match the theoretical and estimated speed curves for each runner.

"The estimated 150-metre times from this model were 14.73 seconds for Mr. Bailey and 14.82 seconds for Mr. Johnson. Taking into account the uncertainty in the analysis, Mr. Bailey's winning margin of 0.09 seconds is statistically significant. The model predicts that Mr. Bailey would win by between 0.03 and 0.22 seconds 95 times out of 100."