Cover

Title Page

1 I Was Put on This Earth to Run

2 Walk Like a Champion

3 My Own Worst Enemy

4 Where Mere Mortals Quiver, the Superstar Becomes Excited by The Big Moment

5 Living Fast

6 The Heart of a Champion, a Mind of Granite

7 Discovering the Moment of No Return

8 Pain or Glory

9 Go Time

10 Now Get Yours

11 The Economy of Victory

12 The Message

13 A Flash of Doubt, a Lifetime of Regret

14 This is My Time

15 I Am Legend

16 Rocket to Russia … and Beyond

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

Highway 2000, Vineyard Toll, Jamaica, 29 April 2009

Man, I gripped that steering wheel hard as the BMW M3 Coupe flipped once, twice, three times; the roof of the car bounced off the wet road and into the ditch. My windscreen smashed, an airbag popped. Bang! The bonnet crumpled as it hit the ground with a crunch.

Everything was still as I came around to what had happened. There was a weird quiet, like the tense, anxious seconds that always took place on a start line before any major championship race. Sssshhhhh! The silence was broken only by the hammering rain outside and the tick-tick-ticking of an indicator light. It was probably the only thing still working. My car was twisted up in a ditch and smoke was pouring out of the engine.

Stress can do crazy-assed things to the mind. I knew something wasn’t right, but it took a second or two for me to realise that I was upside down and my seat belt was the only thing holding me in place. It was such a weird sensation, checking for injuries above my head, in my legs, my feet. Thankfully, I couldn’t feel any pain as I stretched and gently tested the muscles from my toes down.

‘Yo, I’m all right,’ I thought. ‘Me all right …’

In a split second, the accident flashed through my mind and, oh God, it was bad. I’d been driving through the countryside with two girls, friends of mine from Kingston. Manchester United were playing a Champions League semi-final later that day and I was so desperate to catch the game on TV that as we hit the bumpy, country roads near Trelawny, my home parish in the north-west corner of Jamaica, my mind was only on the kick-off. Initially I took a few risks. At times, I pressed too hard on the accelerator and once we had a close shave with an oncoming car. It had just overtaken a van, and as it swerved around, the driver missed us by a couple of feet on the other side.

I looked across at the girl in the passenger seat. She was nearly asleep.

‘How can you relax on roads like this?’ I thought.

Noticing her seat belt was unclipped, I nudged her awake. ‘Look, if you’re going to chill, at least lock up,’ I said. ‘Otherwise if I have to break hard you’re gonna come forward.’

We came off the country tracks and hit Highway 2000 on the west side of Kingston. Jamaica’s roads were smoother there and I was enjoying the heavy purr of the engine and the surge of energy that pumped through my wheels when, out of nowhere, a flash of lightning flickered overhead. There was a clap of loud thunder. We had collided with a tropical storm and it was big. Whoosh! Rain suddenly crashed down and pounded the glass, so I flipped on the windscreen wipers and brushed the brakes, feeling the speed ease off slightly. My tyres hissed through a lake of water on the road.

Whenever it rained I often made a point of dropping gears for safety. The car had been given to me by a sponsor for winning three Olympic gold medals in the 2008 Olympics, and I’d recently visited a drivers’ school at the famous Nürburgring track in Germany to learn how to handle its powerful engine. I knew that on a slick surface, if I moved down a gear, the compression of the car would reduce my speed naturally. But pumping the brakes hard would cause the wheels to lock, and that might send me into a spin. I quickly changed down, moving my clutch foot to one side.

I was barefoot – I preferred to drive that way – and the car’s traction control was positioned next to my leg, but a funny thing had happened a few days earlier: while moving around in my seat, I’d accidentally knocked the button and the tyres had lost a little grip on the tarmac. This time, while focusing on the rain, the highway ahead, I made the same mistake and, without realising it, I knocked the traction control to ‘OFF’. Well, that’s what I think happened, because what took place next was a freak accident that nearly wiped me out for good.

I felt the car shiver a little; the body seemed to tremble at 80 miles per hour.

‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel good,’ I thought. I glanced down and checked the speedometer. It’s not slowing quickly enough!

79 …

78 …

77 …

Adrenaline came in a rush, like something bad was about to happen. That shiver, the slight tremble of the car moments earlier, had been a sign my vehicle was out of control. I wasn’t driving, I was water-skiing.

76 …

75 …

74 …

Come down, yo!

A truck rushed towards me, spray firing up from its wheels like a dozen busted fire hydrants. It was moving fast and as its carriage passed us by, another vehicle followed in the slipstream. Bang! In a heartbeat, the back of my car came around and I was out of control, sliding across the tarmac like a hockey puck on ice. I couldn’t do crap. I felt my body slipping in the seat and g-force moving me sideways. The girl next to me had woken up. Her eyes were wide and she was screaming hard.

Aaaaaaaghhhhhh!

My car careered across the lanes and I could see we were running out of road, fast. It’s not a cool thing to watch the highway falling away, a ditch rushing into view ahead. I knew right then where our asses were going to end up. I put a hand to the roof to prepare myself for the impact, wrestling the steering wheel with the other, in a desperate attempt to regain control.

It’s coming, it’s coming … Oh God, is this it?

I was terrified the car might pop up and jump into a sideways roll.

‘Please don’t flip,’ I thought. ‘Man, please don’t flip.’

We flipped.

The world turned upside down. I felt like a piece of training kit on spin cycle in the washing machine, tumbling over and over. Trees, sky, road passed in the windscreen. Trees, sky, road. Trees, sky, road … We hit the ditch with a Smash! Everything lurched forward and suddenly I was upside down. The airbags blew, all sorts of crap rattled around in the car, keys, loose change, cell phones, and then a weird silence came down, a spooky calm where nothing stirred apart from the tick-tick-ticking of the car’s indicator switch and the pouring rain outside.

I was alive. We all were, just.

‘Yo, you’re in one piece,’ I thought as I busted the door open with a hard shove.

But only God knew how, or why.

***

Sometimes people talk about close calls and near-death incidents and how they can change a man’s way of thinking for ever. For me, my smash on Highway 2000 was that moment, and after the accident I couldn’t view life in the same way again. We had survived. But how? Staggering away from the wreck should have been impossible, especially after the car had flipped over three times.

Everybody knew that speed was my thing, but I hadn’t expected velocity and horse power to so nearly cut me short, and in the hours after the crash, I experienced all the emotions usually suffered by a lucky driver in a car accident. There was guilt for my friends, who had suffered some bumps, bruises and whiplash. I felt stress, the shiver that came with realising that I’d cheated death as I replayed the disaster over and over in my head. I’d been driving fast, my wheels were out of control, and at 70 miles an hour I had flipped and bounced across the road and into a ditch.

Truth was, I should have been gone, a world phenomenon athlete cut down in his prime; a horrible newspaper headline for the world to read:

THE FASTEST MAN ON EARTH KILLED!

Learn the story of how an Olympic gold medallist and world record holder in the 100, 200 and 4x100 metres lived fast and died young!

The fact that I’d made it out alive was a miracle. I was fully functioning too, without a bruise or a mark on my entire body. Well, apart from some thorn cuts. Several long prickles had sliced open the flesh in my bare feet as I crawled from the wreckage, and the wounds were pretty deep. But those injuries felt like small change compared to what might have happened.

‘Seriously?’ I thought, when I was driven home from hospital later that day. ‘There wasn’t even a dent on me – how did that happen?’

A few weeks later, as the horror of what had happened sunk in, when I looked at the photo of my crumpled car online, something dropped with me. Something big. It was the realisation that my life had been saved by somebody else, and I didn’t mean the designer of my airbag, or the car’s seat belts. Instead, a higher power had kept me alive. God Almighty.

I took the accident to be a message from above, a sign that I’d been chosen to become The Fastest Man on Earth. My theory was that God needed me to be fit and well so I could follow the path He’d set me all those years ago when I first ran through the forest in Jamaica as a kid. I’d always believed that everything happened for a reason, because my mom had a faith in God. That faith had become more important to me as I’d got older, so in my mind the crash was a message, a warning. A sign that flashed in big, neon lights.

‘Yo, Bolt!’ it said. ‘I’ve given you a cool talent, what with this world-record breaking thing and all, and I’m going to look after you. But you need to take it seriously now. Drive careful. Check yourself.’

You know what? He had a good point. The Man Above had given me a gift and it was now down to me to make the most of it. My eyes had been opened, I had God in my corner, and He had put me on this earth to run – and faster than any athlete, ever.

Now that was pretty cool news.

I live for big championships, that’s where I come alive. In a normal race I get fired up, I’m eager to win because I’m so damn competitive, but the real desire and passion isn’t there, not fully. It’s only during a major meet that I’m really sharp and determined and have the edge I need to be an Olympic gold medallist or a world record breaker. Psychologically I’m pretty normal the rest of the time.

But give me a big stage, a fight, a challenge, and something happens – I get real. I walk an inch taller, I move a split second faster. I’d probably pop my own hamstrings to win a race. Place a big hurdle in front of me, maybe an Olympic title or an aggressive adversary like the Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake, and I step up – I get hungry.

My school, Waldensia Primary in Sherwood Content, a village in Trelawny, was the scene of my first big challenge. I was eight years old, a gangly kid with way too much energy, and I was always on the lookout for excitement. It’s funny, though I ran around a hell of a lot, my potential on the race track only became an issue once it was spotted by one of my teachers, Mr Devere Nugent, who was a pastor and the school sports freak. I was quick on my feet even then and I loved cricket, but I never thought I could make anything of my speed other than as a bowler. One afternoon, as we played a few overs on the school field, Mr Nugent took me to one side. There was a sports day coming up and he wanted to know if I was competing in the 100 metres event.

I shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

From Grade One in Jamaica, everybody used to play sports and run against one another, but I wasn’t the fastest kid in the school back then. There was another kid at Waldensia called Ricardo Geddes, and he was quicker than me over the shorter sprints. We would run against one another in the street or on the sports field for fun, and while there wasn’t anything riding on our races, my competitive streak meant that I took every single one seriously. Whenever he beat me I always got mad, or I’d cry.

‘Yo, I can’t deal with this!’ I’d moan, often as he took me at the imaginary tape.

The biggest problem for me, even then, was I couldn’t seem to start a sprint quickly enough. It took me for ever to get up from the crouching position. Although I was too young to understand the mechanics of a race, I could tell that my height was a serious disadvantage. It took me longer to come out of the imaginary blocks than a shorter kid. Once I was in my stride I’d always catch up with Ricardo if we were running a longer distance, say 150 metres, but in a 60 metre race I knew there was no chance.

Mr Nugent figured differently.

‘You could be a sprinter,’ he said

I didn’t get it, I shrugged it off.

‘I can see real speed during your bowling run-ups,’ he said. ‘You’re quick, seriously quick.’

I wasn’t convinced. Apart from my races with Ricardo, track and field wasn’t something that had interested me before. My dad, Wellesley, was a cricket nut, and so were all my friends. Naturally, it’s all we talked about. Nobody ever conversed about the 100 metres or the long jump at school, although I could see it was a passion among the older people in Trelawny. All the fun I needed came from taking wickets. Running quick was just a handy tool for taking down batsmen, like my height and strength.

And that’s when Mr Nugent got sneaky. The man bribed me with food.

‘Bolt, if you can beat Ricardo in the school sports day race, I’ll give you a box lunch,’ he said, knowing the true way to a boy’s heart was through his stomach.

Wow, s**t had got serious! A box lunch was The Real Deal, it came packed with juicy jerk chicken, roasted sweet potatoes, rice and peas. Suddenly there was an incentive, a prize. The thought of a reward got me all excited, as did the thrill of stepping up in a big championship. I had come alive on the eve of a superstar meet for the first time. The two top stars in Waldensia Primary were going head to head and nothing was going to stop me from winning.

‘Oh, OK, Mr Nugent,’ I said. ‘If that’s how it is …’

Sports day was a big event at Waldensia, which was a typical rural Jamaican primary school. A row of small, single-storey buildings had been set atop a hill in a clearing in the middle of a stretch of tropical forest. Coconut trees and wild bush surrounded the property; the classrooms had roofs made from corrugated tin and their walls were painted in bright colours – pink, blue and yellow. There was a sports field with some goalposts, a cricket pitch and a running track, which was a bumpy stretch of grass, with lanes marked out with black lines that had been scorched into the ground with burning gasoline. At the finishing line was a shack. On the day of the race it looked to me as if the entire school had lined the lanes in support.

My heart was beating fast, my head was telling me that this was an event as big as any Olympic final. But when Mr Nugent shouted Go! something crazy happened. I got up quick and flew down that track, pushed on by the excitement of competing in a championship for the first time. At first I could hear Ricardo behind me. He was breathing hard, but I couldn’t see him out of the corner of my eye and I knew from our street races that was a good sign. As the metres flashed by, I couldn’t even hear him, which was even better news. My longer strides had taken me into a comfortable lead, and over 100 metres I was out of sight. Ricardo was nowhere near me. By the time I’d busted the tape I was miles ahead, it was over. I’d taken my first major race.

Bang! Winning was like an explosion, a rush. Joy, freedom, fun – it hit me all at once. Taking the line first felt great, especially in something as big as a school sports day race, an event that officially made me the fastest kid in Waldensia. For the first time, the buzz of serious competition had forced me to step up. World records and gold medals were a long way off, but my race against Ricardo had been a push towards getting real in track and field. I was a champ, and as I tumbled to the ground at the end of the lanes I knew one thing: being Number One felt pretty good.

***

There’s an old photo at home that makes me laugh whenever I see it. It’s of me as a kid. I’m maybe seven years old, and I’m standing in the street alongside my mom, Jennifer. Even then I was nearly shoulder high against her. I’m looking ‘silk’ in skinny black jeans and a red T-shirt. I’m clutching Mom’s hand tight, leaning in close, and the look on my face says, ‘To get to me you’ve gotta get through her first.’ It’s a happy time, a happy place.

I was a mommy’s boy back then, still am, and the only time I ever cry today is when something makes my mom sad. I hate to see her upset. Me and Pops were close, I love him dearly, but Mom and me had a special bond, probably because I was her only child and she spoilt me rotten.

Home was Coxeath, a small village near Waldensia Primary and Sherwood Content and, man, it was beautiful, a village among the lush trees and wild bush. Not a huge amount of people lived in the area; there was a house or two every few hundred metres and our old home was a simple, single-storey building rented by Dad. The pace of life was slow, real slow. Cars rarely passed through and the road was always empty. The closest thing to a traffic jam in Coxeath took place when a friend waved out in the street.

To give an idea of how remote it was, back in the day they named the whole area Cockpit Country because it was once a defensive stronghold in Jamaica used by Maroons, the runaway West Indian slaves that had settled there during the 1700s. The Maroons used the area as a base and would attack the English forts during colonial times. If their lives hadn’t been so violent, Coxeath and Sherwood Content would have been a pretty blissful place. The weather was always beautiful, the sun was hot, and even if the sky turned slightly grey, it was a tranquil spot. I remember we called the rain ‘liquid sunshine’.

Despite the climate, tourists rarely swung by, and anyone reading a guidebook would see the same thing in their travel directions: ‘Yo, you can only get there by car and the drive is pretty scary. The road winds through some heavy vegetation over a track full of potholes. On one side there’s a fast-flowing river; trees and jungle hangs down from the other and a crazy-assed chicken might run out on you at any time, so watch your step. About 30 minutes along the way is Coxeath, a small village set in the valley …’ It’s worth the effort, though. That place is my paradise.

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the way I lived when I was young had everything to do with how I came to be an Olympic legend. There was adventure everywhere, even in my own house, and from the minute I could walk I was tearing about the home, because I was the most hyperactive kid ever. Not that anyone would have imagined that happening when I was born because, man, I came out big – nine and a half pounds big. I was such a weight that Pops later told me one of the nurses in the hospital had even made a joke about my bulk when I’d arrived.

‘My, that child looks like he’s been walking around the earth for a long time already,’ she said, holding me up in the air.

If physical size had been the first gift from Him upstairs, then the second was my unstoppable energy. From the minute I arrived, I was fast. I did not stop moving, and after I was able to crawl around as a toddler I just wanted to explore. No sofa was safe, no cupboard was out of reach and the best furniture at home became a climbing frame for me to play on. I wouldn’t sit still; I couldn’t stand in one place for longer than a second. I was always up to something, climbing on everything, and I had way too much enthusiasm for my folks to handle. At one point, probably after I’d banged my head or crashed into a door for the hundredth time, they took me to the doctors to find out what was wrong with me.

‘The boy won’t stop moving,’ cussed Pops. ‘He’s got too much energy! There must be something wrong with him.’

The doc told them that my condition was hyperactivity and there was nothing that could be done; I would grow out of it, he said. But I guess it must have been tough on them at the time, tiring even, and nobody could figure out where I’d got that crazy power from. My mom wasn’t an athlete when she was younger, nor was Pops. Sure, they used to run in school, but not to the standard I would later reach, and the only time I ever saw either one of them sprint was when Mom once chased a fowl down the street after it ran into our kitchen. It had grabbed a fish that was about to be thrown into a pot of dinner. Woah! It was like watching the American 200 and 400 Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson tearing down the track. Mom chased that bird until it dropped the fish and ran into the woods, fearing for its feathers. I always joked that I’d got my physique from Dad (he’s over six foot tall and stick thin like me), but Mom had given me all the talent I needed.

The pace of life in Trelawny suited Mom and Pops. They were both country people and had no need to live anywhere busy like Kingston, but they worked hard. They weren’t ones for putting their foot* up, not for one second. Take Pops, he was the manager at a local coffee company. A lot of beans were produced in the Windsor area, which was several miles south of Coxeath, and it was his job to make sure they got into all the big Jamaican factories. He was always up early, travelling around the country from one parish to the next. Most nights he came home late. Sometimes, when I was little, if I went to bed before six or seven in the evening, I wouldn’t see him for days because he was always working, working, working. Whenever he came back to the house at night I was fast asleep.

Mommy had that same tough work ethic. She was a dressmaker, and the house was always full of materials, pins and thread. Everyone in the village came to our door whenever they needed their clothes repairing, and if she wasn’t feeding me, or pulling me down from the curtains, Mom was always stitching and threading cotton, or fixing buttons. Later, when I got a bit older, I was made to help her and I was soon able to hem, sew and pin materials together. Now I know what to do if ever I rip a shirt,† though I’ll still ask her to mend it because Mom has always been a fixer. If she knew how something worked, like an iron, then she could usually repair it whenever the appliance broke. I think it’s one of the reasons why I became so carefree as a kid. Mom was always ready to sort out anything I’d busted around the house.

I never went hungry living in Coxeath, because it was a farming community and we lived off whatever grew in the area, which was a lot. There were yams, bananas, coca, coconut, berries, cane, jelly trees, mangoes, oranges, guava. Everything grew in and around the backyard, so Mom never had to go to a supermarket for fruit and vegetables. There was always something in season, and I could eat whenever I wanted. Bananas would be hanging from the trees, so I just reached up and tore them down. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any money in my pocket; if my stomach rumbled I would find a tree and pick fruits. Without realising, I was working to a diet so healthy that my body was being packed with strength and goodness.

And then the training started.

Coxeath’s wild bush was like a natural playground. I only had to step out of my front door to find something physical to do. There was always somewhere to play, always somewhere to run and always something to climb. The woods delivered an exercise programme suitable for any wannabe sprinter, with clearings to play in and assault courses made from broken coconut trees. Forget sitting around all day playing computer games like some kids do now; I loved to be outside, chasing around, exploring and running barefoot as fast as I could.

Those forests might have looked wild and crazy to an outsider, but it was a safe place to grow up. There was no crime, and nothing dangerous lurked among the sugar cane. True, there was a local snake called the Jamaican Yellow Boa, and even though it was a harmless intruder, people always freaked out if one slithered into the house. I once heard of some dude attacking one with a machete before throwing the dead body into the street. To make sure the snake was 100 per cent gone, he then flattened it with the wheels of his car and set the corpse on fire. That was pest control, Trelawny-style.

I ran everywhere, and all I wanted to do was chase around and play sports. As I got a bit older, maybe around the age of five or six, I fell in love with cricket and I’d play whenever I was allowed out in the street. Any chance I could get, I’d be batting or bowling with my friends. Mostly we used tennis balls for our games, but if we ever hit a big six into the trees or the nearby cow pen, I’d make a replacement out of rubber bands or some old string. We would then spend hours bowling and spinning our homemade balls through the air. When it came to making wickets I was even more creative – I’d get into the trunk of a banana tree and tear out a big piece of wood. Then I would carve three stumps into the bark and shape the bottom until it was flat. That way it stood up on the ground. If we were desperate, we would even play with a pile of stones or a cut-up box instead of a proper wicket.

It wasn’t all fun, though. There were chores to do for the family, even as a kid and, oh man, did I have to work sometimes! Pops was worried that I wouldn’t pick up the same work ethic that he had when he was little, so once I’d got old enough he would always tell me to do the easier jobs around the house, like the sweeping. Most of the time I was cool with it, but if ever I ran off, he would start complaining.

‘Oh, the boy is lazy,’ said Dad, time after time. ‘He should do some more work around the place.’

As I got older and stronger I was made to do more physical work around the house, and that I hated. We had no pipe water back then, so it became my job to carry buckets from the nearby stream to the family yard, where our supply was stored in four drums. Every week, if Pops was at home, I was ordered to fill them up and that was bad news because each drum held 12 buckets, which meant 48 trips to the river and back. It was tough work, as those buckets were heavy, and I would do anything to get out of carrying them.

Eventually, I figured that I couldn’t be doing 48 trips to fill the drums, it took too long, so instead I would hold two at a time and struggle home with double the weight, despite the extra, painful effort. In my mind I was cutting corners, but carrying two buckets at a time developed me physically: I could feel my arms, back and legs getting bigger with every week. The chores soon built up my muscles, and without ever going to the gym or using weights, I was taking my first steps towards developing some serious muscle. Get this: my laziness was actually making me stronger. Combined with the walking, climbing and running, my dad’s housework was helping me to become a bigger, more powerful person.

The funny thing was that Mom never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do, especially if Pops wasn’t around. If I really grumbled hard I could cry off from bucket duty and he would never find out. The lectures would only start if ever he came home early from work to catch me slacking off. That’s when he would complain. He moaned that Mom loved me too much, and I suppose that was true, but I was her only child, so our bond was extra special.

Sometimes Dad was too strict, though. He didn’t like me to leave the house, and if he was home and I was playing he would always force me to stay in sight, usually in the yard. But whenever Pops went to work, Mom allowed me to roam free. Still, I wasn’t dumb. Wherever I was, I always listened out for Dad’s motorcycle, which would splutter noisily as the wheels came down the hill and into the village. As soon as I heard his engine, I’d drop whatever it was I was doing and sprint to the house as hard as I could, often getting back before Pops got suspicious.

Sometimes I would sneak away to play at a friend’s house which was on a patch of land away from Dad’s usual journey home. Listening out for his old bike became more difficult then, but I had a trick up my sleeve. When I snuck out of the house I would always take Brownie, the family dog, with me. The moment Pop’s bike came rumbling home, Brownie’s ears would prick up long before anyone else could hear a noise. As soon as that dog made to leave, I knew it was my cue to run. In a way, he was giving me a taste of what life would be like in the future:

Listen for the gun …

Bang!

Pop the blocks! Run! Run!

My first trainer was a dog. Ridiculous.

***

I’m going to explain how it is with my family. I have a younger brother, Sadiki, and an older sister, Christine, but we all have different mums. That’s going to sound weird to a lot of people, but that’s the way it is with home life in Jamaica sometimes. Pops had kids with two other people and my parents weren’t married when I was born. Still, it was never an issue with Mom, and whenever Sadiki and Christine came to stay with us in Coxeath they were welcomed into the home like they were her own kids.

Even as I grew older and got to understand relationships, love, and the idea of marriages, our family situation never freaked me out. Mom and Dad eventually got married when I was 12 years old and the only time I became upset about the day was when I wasn’t allowed to be ‘ring boy’, the equivalent of a best man. I wanted to pass the wedding band over to Dad during the ceremony, to be involved, but that responsibility was given to someone else in the village, probably because I was too young.

It never bothered me that I had a brother and sister with different mums, it just seemed natural. Anyway, our family are more laid back about relationships and friendships. We’re not that uptight, especially in conversation when nobody cares about being a little too personal. I’m so close to my parents that I can talk to them about anything, and these days I know that if I converse with Mom and Pops on the phone, their sex life will sometimes come up, especially if Dad has anything to do with it.

It’s crazy. I could be chatting with him about anything – the weather, or cars maybe – but somehow the talk will come back to what goes on in the bedroom. I remember one time when I was talking to the pair of them on the speaker phone at their house. I started the conversation with, ‘Yo, Pops, what’s up?’ And that’s when the Sex Talk started.

‘Hi, Usain,’ he said. ‘It’s all good. I’m good, your Mom’s good – all we do is fool around now …’

I couldn’t believe it. That was an image I did not want in my head. ‘What?!’ I said. ‘Aaaargh! Mom, make him stop!’

Most of the time I’m cool with it, because I’ve heard that style of chat for years, starting when I was a little kid. Sometimes Dad’s friends would call out of their car window when they drove past on their way to work, usually at six in the morning, shouting out all kinds of cusses and rude words.

The first time I got a sign that not everything in life was perfect was probably when I had my first experience with death. My grandfather, Mom’s dad, passed away at home. He slipped on the wet floor while carrying some firewood through the house and he banged his head as he fell. He was out cold. It happened right in front of me, but I didn’t know what to do as I stared at him, lifeless, lying there unconscious. I felt helpless. I was only nine years old, so I knew nothing about first aid. I panicked and rushed next door for help, but when Mom and the neighbours came around I was told that there was nothing that could be done for him. He’d suffered a heart attack, and because the roads were so bad and Coxeath was so remote, there was no way my folks could have got him to a hospital in time. Granddad died shortly after.

As a kid, death didn’t register with me. I didn’t feel anything, because I didn’t really know what was going on. I could see that everybody was sad when we went to the funeral, that everyone was crying, and Mom and her sisters were in tears, but I didn’t feel the same hurt because of my age. I hated it that my mom was so upset, but I was just too young to really get what death and funerals were about. After the burial, I went off to play with friends.

Religion confused me too, and that was a big deal to us as a family, for Mom especially. She was a Seventh Day Adventist, a Christian, and we would go to church every Saturday, because that’s when she believed the Sabbath took place. Dad wasn’t so keen on it. He’d go with her maybe twice a year at Christmas and on New Year’s Eve, but despite the fact that religion wasn’t really for him, he always respected her beliefs. Mom tried to encourage me as I grew up, but not too hard. She would read me the Bible, to teach me right from wrong, but she never tried to force her beliefs on me, for fear of turning me off.

‘If I pressure people to do things too much, they’ll simply turn against the things I’d like them to do,’ she said one time.

Despite her easy approach, I really didn’t enjoy church as a kid. As I got older and started going to track meets, I was pleased whenever they took place at the weekend because it meant that I wouldn’t have to go to service. Instead, Mom would lead me through devotion in the morning – which meant 20 minutes of activities that basically involved some singing, talking and a few verses from the Bible. In her mind it made up for the fact that I wasn’t going to a church at the weekend.

That routine stuck with me, and I turned to religion more and more as I got older, mainly because I came to realise that I’d been given a serious gift. The one thing I began to see was that God always helped people who helped themselves. So whenever I was on a start line and I knew I’d done the work my coach had set me in training, I grabbed the crucifix around my neck, looked up to the sky and asked Him for enough strength to do my best.

After that little chat, it was down to me.

***

A killer athlete can’t just roll up to the start line in any meet and expect to win without working hard. They can’t hope to take gold medals or break world records without discipline. And boy, there was some hard work and discipline in the Bolt home – serious discipline.

My dad was a caring parent, he loved me very much and did everything he could for me when I was little. But he was also the man of the house, a strict, traditional father, and he believed in manners and respect at all times. I wasn’t a bad kid, but if ever I stepped out of line, Pops would always punish me with a lecture. If ever I stepped out of line really bad, though, he would bring out the whoop-ass on me. He would hit me, because he was old school and that was the way he had been brought up by his own dad. Those beatings were always something to be afraid of.

These days I guess roughhouse treatment towards a kid might sound bad to some people, but that’s what happened when children messed around and got into trouble in Jamaica. I was no different and my ass was whooped for all kinds of things, so much so that I always sensed when a hiding was coming. If ever I got hauled in front of Dad, I knew within the first few seconds if I should steady myself for a beating.

If he was visibly angry then I knew my backside was fine, because he preferred a discussion. Spanking was always a last resort and given the choice he would talk and talk and talk, and when he talked, he talked a lot. But if Pops was calm and quiet, that meant I was going to get my ass whooped. When I was naughty in the house, the beating would be with the belt. If I was fooling around outside he would catch me with the hand, and boy, did that hurt. Whack! Whack! Each blow would sting like hell and the tears would come down afterwards, but I don’t resent the spankings at all. They taught me the difference between right and wrong and made me the man that I am today.

See, here’s the thing about my dad: respect was something he would never play around with. Good manners were important to him and he wanted me to grow up with the same values, so I was raised to be a polite and good-natured person. He led by example, too. Dad was always polite to everybody and he expected people to treat him the same way. If ever somebody was rude around him, he wouldn’t stand for it. No matter who a person was in Sherwood Content, or what they did, or how bad or rough they thought they were, if they came around our house without respect, Dad would show them the door.

At the time, I hated his constant need for politeness. I remember the one thing he put on me when I started at Waldensia School, around the age of five or six, was that I had to say ‘Good morning’ to all the folks I passed in the village as I walked to school. And I mean everybody, no matter who they were, or what they were doing at the time. It was ridiculous. I would say ‘Good morning’ to about 20 different people along the way. I must have looked like a crazy person, what with all the ‘Morning, morning, mornings’ as I strolled down the street.

Most of the time, everybody smiled back, but there was this one old lady who would stand at her gate, a real battle-axe, and every day I’d come up the hill and catch her eye. Remembering what Pops had told me, I always nodded and said, ‘Good morning’, but she never used to smile or reply. Not once. She just glared. At first I didn’t let it get to me. I said hello to her daily, knowing that she would ignore me, but then one time I lost my patience.

‘To hell with this!’ I thought. ‘Why should I say “Good morning” to her if she’s going to be rude and ignore me?’

I approached her house as usual and when I saw her there, staring, I just walked on past. There was no nod, there wasn’t a polite call of ‘Good morning’. Instead, I carried on up the track without a word. I didn’t think any more of it, but I should have known better because it was Jamaica and rudeness in kids was always frowned upon. When I got home that afternoon I couldn’t believe my eyes: there she was in the front room and that lady looked seriously pissed. She glared at me hard. Her arms were folded and she was tapping away with her foot. The only thing missing was a rolling pin to hit me with. And then Dad grabbed me by the shirt.

‘Bolt,’ he said calmly, quietly, a sure sign that I was in some serious trouble, ‘Didn’t I tell you to say “Good morning” to everybody you passed on the street, no matter what?’

‘But Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve been saying “Good morning” to this lady every day and she never …’

‘No matter what!’ he said again.

I was so angry with that old woman. I knew she had brought me a whole world of whoop-ass, but it was a valuable lesson for a boy growing up. As the smacks rained down on my backside, they made me appreciate the importance of manners and respect even more. And I never ignored anybody ever again. Man, I wouldn’t have dared.

* In patois or English creole we use the word ‘foot’ to describe any part of the leg – the thigh, the feet, the calves; to put your foot up is to put your feet up. Other phrases are ‘bad’, which often means good, and ‘silk’, which means stylish.

† Come on man, get serious – I buy a new one. Don’t be so ridiculous.

I arrived in my khaki uniform at Waldensia Primary and friendships happened quickly. I had energy and good manners, so I got on with most people, but I really liked the kids who enjoyed cricket and I’d hit it off with anyone who had a bat and a ball. I became friends with a kid called Nugent Walker Junior, because he was as excited as I was by watching the likes of Courtney Walsh and Brian Lara on the TV, and we hung out most days, smashing sixes around the school field.

Nugent lived down the way from me and he would be waiting for me outside his house as I walked to school. We became inseparable. Almost straightaway he was nicknamed ‘NJ’ by friends, which made sense – it came from his initials after all. But after we’d been hanging out for a while, everyone at school called me ‘VJ’. I had no idea where it came from, but I really didn’t mind the tag because I’d taken to hating my name. Nobody could say it right and I was called ‘Oosain’, ‘Oh-sain’ or ‘Uh-sain’ whenever I met someone for the first time. Some kids referred to me as ‘Insane’, which gave the impression I was bad or tough. But it was only when girls started saying my name at high school that I finally got into it.

‘Yooo-sain! Yooo-sain!’ they cooed.

‘Oh, I see,’ I thought when I heard it for the first time. ‘Usain sounds kinda nice whenever a girl calls for me from across the street.’

At school I was pretty good in class, especially math, and when lessons began I made an important discovery: man, I loved to compete! As soon as a problem went up on the chalk board, I’d race to finish. Often NJ would battle me to see who could complete the sums first, and that’s when a killer instinct showed up. Everything I got involved in, I did it to win. I had to win. First was everything, second only meant losing. And I really hated losing.

I cruised through my first few years at school, and sports quickly became my thing. Thanks to all that running around the wild bush in Coxeath I was fast. In cricket when I bowled I could come down on the wicket hard, with speed, and I was quick in the field. My physical size gave me an advantage over the other pupils because I was growing into a tall kid, and at the age of eight I was taking wickets off cricketers a lot older than me, guys that were 10 or 11 years old. I was already the same height as them and it wasn’t long before I’d opened the batting for Waldensia a couple of years earlier than most kids even made the team.

I was pretty good at sprinting, too. I had potential. I was quick on my feet and after I’d beaten Ricardo in the Waldensia sports day, I entered my first serious inter-schools race (where the prize was made out of tin and plastic rather than rice and peas), winning all my events. After a few more competitions in 1997, it was obvious to everyone that I was the fastest kid in Sherwood Content, and I later won the Trelawny parish champs when I was 10. People were taking notice of what I could do and I was winning school race after school race. Our house creaked at the fittings with all the plastic trophies and medals I was bringing back for winning this championship and that, but none of it was really serious to me. I just enjoyed running for fun. I loved the sensation of coming first in school races, of beating the other kids, but there was no way I could have seen that track and field was a serious future for me at that time. How could I? I was just a kid.

It was opening doors, though. After a couple of years competing at school level and winning parish meets with Waldensia, I was invited to race the 100 and 150 metres events in the National School Championships. I got my ass whooped in both, but because I was clearly one of the fastest in the north-west of Jamaica of my age, I was invited to be a sports scholarship student at William Knibb High School, which was a short car ride away from home, near Falmouth, where a lot of the big cruise ships dropped off their tourists.

William Knibb was a great place, a nice school with a fantastic sporting history. One of their former students, Michael Green, had competed in the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, where he’d finished seventh place in the 100 metres. They also had a strong reputation for cricket, but it was my racing ability that made me eligible for a spot in one of their classes.

Here’s why: in Jamaican high schools, track and field was huge. The passion for athletics was as big as it is for football in English schools, or the US colleges’ love for American football and basketball. The way the system worked – from youth talent through to pro level – was that a kid first competed at local meets. If they got hot and won a few big inter-schools races at junior level, as I had at Waldensia, then they got to race in the parish, or state champs, where the standard went up a little. Get to high school and make some noises in the bigger meets and an athlete soon found himself competing at secondary school national level. That was where life got interesting. A kid with serious game in his mid-teens could draw flattering attention from American colleges, who usually offered sports scholarships. Pro contracts and big dollars followed soon after.

I was on the bottom rung of that ladder, but William Knibb could tell that I carried the potential to compete in some of the bigger meets in the coming years. One of those was the Inter-Secondary Schools Boys and Girls Championships, or ‘Champs’ as everyone called it back home. To anyone outside the island, the event sounded like a super-sized sports day, but Champs was the biggest deal for any junior athlete in Jamaica and a national obsession. In fact, it was probably the biggest school event in the Caribbean.

Champs was – and is – the heartbeat of Jamaican track and field success. It was first set up in 1910 to pitch the best athletic kids in the country against one another, and every year in March over 2,000 children would battle it out. The best schools were crowned ‘King’ or ‘Queen’, and the event was always screened on TV. Hell, it even took over the front pages of our national newspapers. A lot of countries all over the world were having difficulties when it came to financing their junior athletic meets, but Champs was such a big deal that a number of serious sponsorship contracts paid for its organisation every year.

I could understand the appeal. The four-day meet was usually held at the National Stadium in Kingston and the 30,000 tickets for each day sold out fast. The demand was huge because people wanted to see the next generation of national superstars, and when those tickets had gone loads of people jumped over the fence to get in, which meant the bleachers were always jammed. People would dance in the crowd, there were horns blaring, school bands played noisily in the seats. If anybody wanted to pee they were screwed, because it would take an hour to get to the bathroom.

On the flip side, Champs provided a hunting ground for Jamaica’s government-funded coaches. In 1980, our old Prime Minister Michael Manley established the GC Foster College – an educational facility working entirely in physical education and sports coaching. It’s one of the reasons why, with a population of 2.7 million people, Jamaica developed as many gold medallists as a lot of the world’s bigger countries. GC Foster College produced the coaches; the coaches scouted the best junior athletes at Champs, then they turned them into title-winning pros.

Understandably, head teachers from across the country were always looking out for new athletic talents to add to their Champs alumni. Schools got a lot of props for producing successful track and field competitors, and William Knibb’s principal, Margaret Lee, was a teacher with sporting smarts. After she had got wind of some of my race times, Miss Lee told me that the school would pay a chunk of my tuition fees as part of a sports scholarship. They had spotted my athletic potential. A subsidised education seemed a fair trade for my track and field talent in 1997, especially if I stepped up and made it all the way to Champs a few years down the line.

That pleased Pops. Although he worked real hard for the coffee company, we weren’t rich enough to afford expensive school fees; our life was financially modest. But Dad believed it was important that I got everything I needed when I was a kid. He loved me dearly and cared for me, so if there was something I required for some forward movement in life, like a pair of running shoes or a place at William Knibb High School, then he made sure I got it – no problem. I wasn’t spoiled and I definitely didn’t go around getting everything I asked for, but Mom and Dad gave me the helping hand I needed to get started.

My only problem with going to William Knibb was that the school didn’t want me to play cricket any more, not seriously anyway. I was 11 years old, and I was hoping to go to PE lessons, pick up my pads and bat and continue with my dream of becoming a Test sensation. The teachers had other ideas, though. They wanted me to focus on my running, and in the first week at school, when I wandered over to the wicket in the middle of the school field to play, I was turned away.

‘No, Bolt,’ said the teacher. ‘You’re not supposed to be over here, I can’t keep you. The running track is that way.’

That was a bit of a bummer. I went home that night and complained, but Pops set me straight on the matter. Cricket, he said, would prove to be a political game for me, rather than one that was based on my talents and hard work. A coach’s team choices were sometimes swayed by favouritism, but in athletics a person was selected through his times and personal bests.

‘Bolt, if you do well in track and field, it’s on you and no one else,’ he said. ‘In cricket, there are other people involved because it’s a team sport. It can get tricky. You could play well, better than anyone else, but if the coach has a favourite, then you might not get picked. That happens quite a lot in life and it’s unfair. But in track and field you’re the boss of yourself.’

His words sunk in. I liked the idea of being in charge. When it came to the next PE lesson I focused my efforts on the track, and over the following 12 months I must have tried every distance going: the 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres, 800 metres and 1500 metres. I did relays, I even tried cross-country once, but hated it, because running that far felt like way too much hard work.

Eventually, I settled on running the 200 and 400 metres as my competitive events, because it was clear I didn’t have the lungs or will-power to run anything longer, not at a serious level anyway. Those events also made the most of my speed stamina, the power to run at a high pace without tiring. All those hours running around the bush at Coxeath and playing sports had paid off. I was fast and strong on short to medium distances.

The 100 metres was out because I was already six feet tall and still growing. That physical stature apparently made me too big to run the shorter distance. The belief among William Knibb’s coaches was that it would take me for ever to unravel my body out of the blocks, and by the time I’d fired out of the start position, they said, my shorter opponents would be halfway to winning the race.

Luckily, it didn’t matter if I was slowest out of the blocks in the 200 or 400, because with my long strides and quick legs I was able to catch up with the shorter athletes after 50 metres or so, even though my technique was raw back then. I would run with my head up, looking around at everyone else in the race; my knees would come up really high as I pounded the lane. If I’d flapped my arms a bit more, I probably would have taken flight.

That crazy-assed style didn’t stop me from dominating all the other kids at William Knibb on the track. As I took to the 200 and 400, I’d sometimes show off a little bit because I was physically so much faster than everyone else and winning came so easily to me. In PE everybody else seemed extra slow, and there were times when I’d burn away from the pack in a race, stopping at the finish to walk over the line in first spot, just as everybody else had closed in on me.

One time, I remember running the 400 metres final during an inter-schools meet and for a while I was neck and neck with the fastest other kid in the lanes. He was sprinting alongside me, giving everything he had. The veins were popping in his neck, I swear his eyes were on stalks with all the effort, but I hadn’t even got into second gear. As I came off the corner I looked over and smiled.

‘Yo, later,’ I shouted, showing him a clean pair of heels.

When he got to the line, which was a long time after me, he looked seriously pissed.

I couldn’t help fooling around, because competition brought out a determined streak in me and winning was a joy. I had so much natural talent that on sports days nobody else came close to me and I’d line up in just about every race on the card and come first. One time I even entered the high jump and long jump events because I figured they might be fun. When I finished first in both, the other kids cussed as I collected all my medals, but I couldn’t blame them. The boys at William Knibb had to line up against me in an event – any event – knowing that first place had already been taken. There wasn’t a kid in the school that had a chance of catching me once the gun had gone.*

The school could see that I had a serious talent. It got to the point where I was running so quickly in training that the coaches wouldn’t tell me my times. They didn’t want me to get big-headed because they were off the scale for a boy my age. I later heard that when a new PE teacher timed me in the 200 he had to double-check his watch afterwards.

‘What?!’ he said to the kids standing around him. ‘The times Bolt is running are ridiculous. They cannot be for real.’

He reset his watch and made me run again. Then again. And again. Every time I crossed the line and looked over, he was pulling the same shocked face, tapping on the face of his watch like it was broken. The readings on his timer were as quick, if not quicker, than before.

***

I was my own worst enemy. Despite Pops’s discipline at home, I became lazy. At school, I wasn’t too keen on training either. I never pushed myself when it came to practice and I’d do enough to get through a session without really exerting my body. Because my raw talent was out of this world, I used to cruise through practice and get by. Usually getting to the start line and running was enough for me to win a school championship, but my lack of effort meant I wasn’t improving or working on any new techniques. The trophies and accolades had papered over the cracks – there were some major flaws in my running. With my floppy neck and high knees, I really had no style at all.

The problem was that I still couldn’t face the hours of training, especially in the 400. Working the 200 metres was so hard, but at least it didn’t kill me. There I only had to run intervals of 300 and 350 metres, time after time, in what was called background training: the tough endurance programme every athlete had to do to prepare them for the season ahead. Background training gave me the strength and fitness to run at high speeds for longer periods of time in a race. It also gave me a high level of base fitness, so if I got injured in a season, I could still maintain my strength and stamina for when I returned to work.

In the 400, though, background training was an altogether different game. I had to run for consecutive reps of 500, 600 and 700 metres. That seemed impossible to me, and often I would vomit on the track after sessions and beg the coach for a rest from all the pain. Even worse, there were exercise routines to be done, because if I was going to be a top runner, my core muscles had to be strong so I could generate some serious power in my legs as I burned around the track. But doing them was tough. One of my roughest coaches was a sergeant-major type called Mr Barnett, and the guy was real awful. He would make us do 700 sit-ups a day. Seven hundred! Even worse was that all the student athletes had to do his abs sessions at the same time. If one person stopped, we all had to start over from scratch.

‘Forget this,’ I thought. ‘I can’t deal with it.’

From then on, I would do anything to duck out of practice, especially if I knew I was working on the longer background runs, or one of Mr Barnett’s torture sessions.

The truth was, I saw running as a hobby rather than the main reason for my spot at William Knibb. At the age of 12, I would skip evening practice sessions at school and head into nearby Falmouth with friends to play video games at the local arcade. The place was owned by a guy called Floyd, and his set-up was pretty simple: there were four Nintendo 64 games consoles and four TVs; it was a Jamaican dollar per minute to play. To get the slot money, I would skip lunch and save the coins Mom had given me for food. Super Mario Cart and Mortal Kombat were my games, I was on them non-stop, and most evenings my hands would hurt from the joystick because I’d played for too long.

Whenever Mom or Dad wanted to know how training had gone, I never told them that I’d skipped a session. Instead I’d shrug my shoulders and act like I’d been running real hard – a yawn or two would usually do the trick. But the fun soon ended when a cousin snitched on me. She had moved into the area near the games room and knew that my dad didn’t like me playing in there. As soon as she spotted me walking into Floyd’s place, she couldn’t wait to tell my parents, and Pops brought out the whoop-ass real bad. I was so pissed at her. I was banned from the arcade, and the school’s head coach, a former Olympic sprinter called Pablo McNeil, tried to explain the importance of my training.

‘You’re running phenomenal times, Bolt,’ he said. ‘If you take this thing serious, can you imagine the times you might establish?’

Mr McNeil was a serious force. He was a stern-looking man with grey hair and a moustache, but back in the day when he was an athlete he had a bunch of wild, afro hair. He looked cool, then. Mr McNeil had been a semi-finalist in the 1964 Games in Tokyo, but despite his experience, the advice didn’t sink in and I carried on fooling around. One evening, after I’d skipped training again, he hired a taxi and drove to Falmouth. He found me at Floyd’s place, hanging out with some of the girls from William Knibb.

My dad’s mood wasn’t improved by the news that my grades were bad too, especially in math. The speed I’d once shown with sums at Waldensia had disappeared, and I couldn’t get my head around the stuff my tutors were trying to teach the class. I became confused at first. I thought, ‘S**t, what happen?’ Then I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need any of the ideas they were trying to put on me.

‘Come on, when am I going to need Pythagoras’s Theorem in real life?’ I thought. ‘Why do I need to know about the hypotenuse formula? Please.’

It was clear to everyone that I couldn’t care less about school. In my first two years at William Knibb I did what I had to do to scrape through. The teachers tried to convince me that my lessons would help with a sports career, just to give me some extra incentive, but that didn’t help either because I couldn’t imagine that a career in track and field was going to happen – not really. My languages teacher, Miss Jackson, even told me one day: ‘Usain, you should learn Spanish. If you’re going to be an athlete you’re going to travel and you’re going to meet different people and you’re going to want to talk to them. Spanish is a language you should take up.’

I wasn’t impressed.

‘Nah, it’s not for me,’ I thought. ‘I hate Spanish.’†

Dad’s problems with my slack attitude were the annual, supplementary tuition payments he had to make to the school. He knew that if I failed a year I’d have to repeat it, and that meant an extra bunch of school bills. He got mad again. It was whoop-ass time.

‘If you get held back, Bolt, that’s it!’ he shouted one evening. ‘Anything can happen in track and field – you could be injured and never run as quickly again. If you haven’t got something in your head to fall back on there won’t be anything to help you later on in life.’

To focus me even more, Dad took to getting me up at half past five in the morning. It was crazy. School didn’t start until 8.30, but he wanted me up at the crack of dawn. I would moan every time the alarm went off.

‘What is this?’ he would shout, if ever I stayed in bed. ‘Boy, why are you so lazy?’

Luckily, Mom was a lot softer. As soon as Pops had left for work she would let me go back to sleep. To make sure I wasn’t late for lessons, Mom would then call me a cab to school.

***

Although I didn’t know it at the time, my lazy attitude to training was affecting those all-important competitive performances. Hands down I was the best runner at William Knibb, but when it came to the Regional Championships, I was forever getting my ass kicked by a kid called Keith Spence from Cornwall College. And that pissed me off.

Spence was a mixed-race Jamaican boy and he was pumped up with muscle. The one thing we’d heard about him at school was that his dad had pushed him hard, and I later learned he would make Keith go to the gym all the time. But the extra work had given him an advantage over me because he was more developed, more ripped than I was, even though we were both only 13. His strong abs gave him extra power on the track and I could not take him at the line, no matter how hard I tried. Because I hadn’t bothered with the gym work, because I’d skipped too many of Mr Barnett’s sit-up sessions, I had fallen behind the competition.

But losing to Keith Spence was just as painful to me as those 700 stomach crunches, so after yet another defeat at a regional track meet in 2000, I decided enough was enough. I got furious, and the annoyance gave me focus. Like my race with Ricardo Geddes and Mr Nugent’s promise of the box lunch, I had a goal. I wanted to beat that kid, even if it broke me.

‘Nah, Keith Spence,’ I said to myself on the way home. ‘It’s not going to happen next time.’

It was another big challenge, I had another major adversary, and it was time to step up. I started training a little bit harder, I worked and worked during the school summer break, and as I got more and more into practice, something special happened. I caught my first glimpse of the Olympics when someone showed me some video footage of the 1996 Atlanta Games.

That clip blew my mind. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen, firstly because watching any kind of Olympic sport was a rarity in Jamaica. We just didn’t have the technology or finances to screen top sporting events at the turn of the 21st century. If a Kingston TV company wanted to screen the Games live back in the day, it would have cost them huge amounts of money. There was no satellite or cable TV in Sherwood Content either. To get a clear picture from abroad we needed a pole and dish to pick up a decent reception. It wasn’t like we turned the box on and an ESPN or Sky Sports picture came to life like it does now. Watching TV took some serious effort, so catching any form of track and field was a big deal for me.

That first glimpse was also important because I could see how popular the 100 metres was, and the 200 metres, the 400 metres, even the damn 800 metres, and all over the world too, not just in Jamaica. It was much bigger than the inter-schools and parish champs I’d been involved in. Even the 30,000 strong crowd at Champs looked small in comparison. I could tell that the Olympics was huge everywhere. Up until that moment I hadn’t known just how big sprinting was around the world.

But the most wonderful part of watching those old Games was seeing Michael Johnson for the first time, an athlete running the 200 metres and 400 metres, my events. Even better, he won golds in both and broke the 200 world record with a time of 19.32 seconds. Now that was exciting, but the main thing I noticed as I watched him running around the track to first place was that his back was so upright, his head stared straight down the lane. It was weird to see a guy run like that.

I could not for the life of me work out how he was doing it. Johnson seemed so smooth, he made his races look too easy. Even when he was tiring towards the end of the 400 metres final – the seconds when his muscles were probably burning up – every part of his body was upright. As he crossed the line in first place, I remember thinking: ‘Man, I want to be somebody like Michael Johnson. I want to be an Olympic gold medallist.’ It was the first time the thought had ever crossed my mind.

That was bad news for Keith Spence. The next time I went to training I tried to copy Johnson’s style. I came out of the blocks and pushed my body into the same rigid, upright position, but it hurt my back real bad, so I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. I wasn’t deterred from learning, though, and to improve more I watched videos, old footage, documentaries that told me about the history of the Olympics and the great Jamaican athletes, like the 400 metre runner Herb McKenley and the 400 and 800 metre runner Arthur Wint, who became the country’s first Olympic gold medallist in 1948.

Then a coach showed me a videotape of Don Quarrie, the Jamaican who won the gold medal in the 200 metres at the 1976 Montreal Games. Now, if I’d thought Michael Johnson was smooth when he raced, Don Quarrie made him look like a robot. That man took the corner so gracefully that it was almost an art form to me. Straightaway I had to perfect that aspect of my race, and the next time I practised I started emulating him on the corner.

It was clear from watching those old athletes that I still had to learn a lot about running the 200 metres. There was a lot of technical stuff to get into my head once I’d left the blocks, especially as I was a tall guy. Ideally, a sprinter should run the curve on the track as close to the line as possible, because it’s the most effective way of racing over 200 or 400 metres. The runner travels less distance that way, a bit like Lewis Hamilton cutting off the corner in Formula One racing.

For Quarrie, running tight on the 200 metre curve on a track was easier because he was small. He had a low centre of gravity. That meant he could control his shorter strides with ease. He wasn’t going to move around in his lane too much and lose time. I couldn’t do that, I was too tall. You bet I tried, but as soon as I picked up speed, my longer legs took me wide because I had less control.

In an attempt to get over the problem, I spent hours practising that racing line, and what I quickly realised was that I would have to run the first 50 metres of a 200 metres race in the middle of the lane. Once that was done, just as I’d hit top speed, I could drift closer to the inside line to run the corner more effectively. Then I would be around the turn and firing towards the finishing line like a slingshot, and I could get back into the middle of the lane. Well, that was the theory anyway. It didn’t always work out in practical terms.

All of a sudden, I was psyched by the 200 metres. Losing to Keith Spence had been the inspiration behind that process, and over the following year I began improving on my running technique. But there was also another very important boost to my ability: I had grown again. I was 14 years of age by the time it came to the regional champs a year later and I was six feet two in height. My stride was seriously long, too. When we lined up again in the 200, Keith Spence had nothing on me. He looked as bad as ever, he was ripped. But I was taller, sharper and much, much faster on the corner than before.

Bang! The gun fired. Because of Spence’s muscles he burst out of the blocks real fast, but once I’d taken the corner, he couldn’t keep up. I came off the curve with strength, I had started out in the middle of the lane and maintained a smooth rhythm. As I hit top speed I drifted over. My steps were tight to the line and when I hit the straight, every stride pushed me further and further away from my rival. I peeked over my shoulder. The kid was struggling to keep up.

By the time I’d crossed the line, I was out of sight. ‘Yo, I got him!’

I guess that was the moment of big discovery for me. I had to run the 200 metres in an effective style. But I’d created a mantra that would define my mental attitude towards opponents for the rest of my career. If I beat you in a big meet, you’re not going to beat me again. From that moment, I knew that once I’d taken a tough athlete for the first time, that was it. I had superiority and the confidence to win, again and again. It was a psychological stepping stone, and the realisation that gave me the mindset of a true champ.

I realised that, yeah, a runner could beat me in a one-off meet, a small event, but in a big championships, like my first ever school race at Waldensia, or the regional champs, it wasn’t going to happen – end of story. I had proven it with Ricardo Geddes, and now Keith Spence. I’d pushed on, and winning was now a serious habit.

* My successes were so regular that Miss Lee later arranged for the school sports day to take place when she knew I would be away at international competition – just to give the other a kids a chance.

† Damn, if only I’d listened. Over the last few years I’ve met some of those Spanish girls and a lot of them were seriously beautiful. The only problem was that I couldn’t converse with any of them at the time – in a club, at a party – because I didn’t speak the language. Miss Jackson had been right. I later became so vexed about the situation that I went out and bought the language computer program, Rosetta Stone, just so I could pick up a few phrases. I didn’t take too much away from it, but enough to know that anything sounds romantic in French and Spanish, but German is another story.

I stepped up again and again. Junior rivals fell like dominoes, and after Keith Spence I hit a winning streak at Jamaica’s regional level – I was hot. But despite my successes, track and field just seemed like a whole load of fun to me, nothing more.

That laid-back way of thinking was the perfect mindset for an athlete: I was relaxed before every race, I felt chilled about my performances; I didn’t get freaked out by tough events where the field was seriously strong. And I definitely didn’t stress about racing, not like some of the other kids did. They got nervous before their starts, they obsessed about smashing their personal bests. I had a champion’s confidence because I was so relaxed.

Following my victory over Spence, I worked harder in training, but not that much harder. Raw talent was still all I needed to win most races, but I upped my game a little. Sure, there were times when I’d skip training, and as soon as my absence was noticed, Coach McNeil would find me. He would cuss and lecture me as my ass was hauled back to school, but once our work had started at the track, I’d run nearly every lap on his training schedule.

Sometimes hard work wasn’t enough, though. Take Champs at the National Stadium in Kingston for example. When I qualified for my first appearance in 2001 at the age of 14, no running session in the world could have prepared me for that, because it was big, seriously big. I arrived at the event for the first time and my mind blew. The National Stadium was wild, a bowl-shaped arena with a track sunk into the ground and ringed by one vast stand which overflowed with people. It was built for serious competition, and I felt like a serious athlete.

Inside, it was just as I’d imagined from seeing it on the TV and reading about it in the newspapers. The fans were rowdy, everyone was going nuts. It was like being in a big South American football ground, where the supporters were ridiculously passionate. Before each race, as the runners stepped on to the lanes, kids from every school screamed at the top of their lungs and it was impossible to hear anything. I walked into that stadium for my first 200 metres heat and I got a rush from the noise. People banged on drums and played trumpets. The energy it brought to the arena gave me tingles. In that moment, Champs seemed like my Superbowl, Champions League final and Olympic Games rolled into one.

I was racing in Class Two, which was an under-16 event.* That meant I was one of the youngest competitors on the start line, and at that age one or two years could sometimes be quite a disadvantage in terms of physical power and technical ability. I didn’t let it faze me, I was there for the buzz, though anyone looking at the line-up would have thought I was the oldest in the race – I could see over the heads of every rival in the lanes.

A cool head was important at an event like Champs because stress could be a big thing for a lot of high-school athletes. School pride and prestige meant that there was some serious pressure to do well in the competition. A lot of hype was attached to being the school with the best track and field programme in Jamaica, so everybody upped their game. The standard was high. My A-race was going to be needed if William Knibb were to have chance of winning anything.

The competition worked on a team points system, and individual results were combined to determine an overall score, so my contribution would be vital. But there was individual pressure, too. The teachers at William Knibb kept talking about how Champs had been a springboard for success for some of the great Jamaican stars. Don Quarrie, Herb McKenley and the 100 and 200 metre runner Merlene Ottey had all done well at Champs before going on to the world stage. Then there was the promise of a future beyond school: any junior stars of school-leaving age could expect the offer of an athletics scholarship in America, should they shine in the Kingston National Stadium; the younger kids might find their cards marked for future selection.

I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. My excitement was focused solely on the track, the stadium and the fans. But despite my age and inexperience of handling big crowds, there weren’t any nerves, there was no fear. In the 200, I cruised through my heats, into the final and I was hyped – it felt like just another championship meet to me. Bang! When I got out of the blocks, I tore past nearly all of the field, taking a silver medal with a time of 22.04 seconds. The William Knibb fans in the stands went crazy. The whole crowd seemed to be going crazy. It was wild.

With one race, I was on the map. With my second, I was the focus of the country’s athletics fans. I was due to race Jermaine Gonzales† in the 400 metres final, a powerhouse sprinter. Whenever he ran he became a crazy-assed whirlwind of limbs and braided hair. Jermaine was the defending national champ at that time and I knew the cat had game, but I’d also realised there wasn’t a lot between me and him in terms of times, so I’d need to beat him by using brains rather than pure speed in our next 400 metres race.

In recent months I had developed a tactical edge. Like a football coach, I had started planning strategies before meets. As I battled the top kids in Jamaican athletics, I realised that to win I needed to act smart sometimes, so in competitions I found my rivals’ strengths and weaknesses. I watched them in the heats to understand their styles of running and how they attacked a race. Often my first move in any championships was to work out whether I needed to change my game to deal with a strong opponent. Most of the time I knew I’d be quick enough to win on talent alone, but sometimes I used strategy to get to the line in first place.

A week before Champs, NJ and me had sat in the school library to chat tactics. The pair of us had gone to William Knibb together, and while I’d excelled in the brawn department, NJ had been training his mind – he was an A-grade student. But he also understood the art of track and field, he was a sports nut like me, and while the other kids hunched over their books and scribbled into their pads, NJ dissected Jermaine’s sprinting style. We were whispering like spies planning an undercover attack.

‘I know he’s good over 400,’ said NJ. ‘As good as you, but I think you’re the faster 200 metre runner.’

I nodded. ‘OK … And?’

‘VJ, if you attack the first corner hard, and the first half of the 400 too, it’ll psyche him out, especially if you come out of the blocks at the front of the pack. Your good start might panic Jermaine, knock him off his rhythm and force him into over-stretching. That’s when you can take the race, because he’ll lose his technique and you can cruise home.’

At the next championships I stuck to NJ’s tactics and Pow! when the gun popped I moved away from the start line as hard as I could. I was five metres ahead of Jermaine at the corner and as he pushed himself in a desperate attempt to catch up, I heard him cry out. Like NJ predicted, he had panicked, he’d overstretched and pulled a hamstring. All I had to do was burn down the home stretch to first place.

NJ and I felt like masterminds. We later heard that Jermaine had been carrying an injury, but I knew that my attitude to race tactics had helped me to step up. It was a serious learning curve. Afterwards, people talked me up as a contender, a star for the future, and my results in Champs meant that I was eligible to represent Jamaica in the 2001 CARIFTA Games in Barbados. This was a junior competition organised by the Caribbean Free Trade Association every year and held all over the islands in places such as Trinidad and Tobago and Bermuda.

Talk about changing the game. CARIFTA was a competition where the best of the Caribbean junior athletes got together. It was also my first shot at representing the country. But even though I was pulling on a Jamaica running vest in an international event, I still didn’t think anything spectacular was happening. CARIFTA was just another race to me, and I took silver in the 200 metres and set a personal best of 48.28 seconds in the 400.

It was all adventure. Flying to Barbados was the first time I had left Jamaica and, for a while, it felt like a holiday. Then I got homesick and started to miss Mom. One night, as I tried to sleep, I even began crying because I wanted to go home. Back then, I hated the idea of being away from Jamaica for too long. But the Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA, or the Jay-3-As), saw beyond my immaturity and developed a more serious game plan. They had seen some potential in my running style and times, and shortly after Barbados they selected me again, this time to wear Jamaican colours in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Youth Championships in Debrecen, Hungary, and that’s when I damn well nearly freaked out.

‘Hungary? Are you kidding me?’ I thought when I heard the news. ‘Where the hell is that place?’

There was a lot of head scratching going on when I looked at the world map at home. It took me ages to find Hungary, and when I finally saw it somewhere in the middle of Europe, Debrecen looked just about the farthest place away from Jamaica. And man, talk about a journey! First we flew to London and got a bus from one airport to another, then we flew to Hungary and drove out to The Middle of Nowhere. Our trip seemed to go on for ever.

‘Wow, this is something serious,’ I thought, staring out of the coach window at the Hungarian rain and the grey clouds (believe me, this was not liquid sunshine). ‘There’s some pretty big stuff going on if they’re flying me all the way out here.’

My potential as a serious athlete had crossed my mind for the first time, but travelling to Europe was an eye-opening experience in other ways, too. The food was weird, the weather was cold, and I remember the one thing everybody kept going crazy about was the bottled water. It was fizzy! That might sound naïve now, but remember, I was a kid from Jamaica, I had never tasted ‘fizz water’ before, so it confused the hell out of me. I remember my first taste – I was in a supermarket and I gulped it down as all the other kids laughed. But it wasn’t long before the fizz water was coming back up again. There were bubbles everywhere – in my mouth, throat and nose; there were probably bubbles coming out of my ears.

I couldn’t stand the stuff. But after running the 400-metre leg of the sprint medley relay a day or two later (a sprint medley race is like a normal relay, but the four athletes sprint different lengths – 400 metres, 200 metres, 200 metres and 800 metres), that attitude changed. My muscles were tired and my lungs burned. As I picked myself up off the track, someone handed me a bottle of fizz water and I forgot all about the horrible taste. I gulped down two litres of the stuff in record time.

***

I didn’t expect to land in Hungary and win anything. I was 14 and the World Youth Champs was an under-17s event. Again, a lot of people older than me had been invited, so I was only going there to try my best, but unlike Champs my best wasn’t good enough and I ran pretty badly in the 400 metre and medley races. Despite running a personal best of 21.73, I was knocked out of the 200 metre semi-finals, which was unheard of for me.

Debrecen was a bump in the road, though, and I soon began to improve my race results. I later broke the CARIFTA Games records in both the 200 and 400 metres during the 2002 games in Nassau when I was 15, and as I came off the track the crowd started screaming, ‘Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!’ I got chills. Suddenly I had a nickname to go along with my talents. During the same year, I repeated the trick in the Central American and Caribbean Junior Championships. I was so much quicker than everyone else in those events, it was stupid. I was dominating the older boys because I was becoming physically superior to all of them.

The big test, I knew, would arrive when the World Junior Championships came around later that year. Considered by most folks in track and field to be the Olympics for high-school and college kids around the world, this was my big shot at making a serious name for myself. I was physically stronger and mentally sharper than I had been in Debrecen; I had maxed out in the height department and was six foot five inches tall. There weren’t many dudes who could match me for strides in a 200 or 400 metre race.

Luck was also on my side because the prestigious meet was being held in Kingston, home turf, and not some rainy town in Eastern Europe. That meant I wouldn’t have to travel far, freeze my ass off or drink any fizz water. The flip side was huge, though, because as a local boy with talent there was some heat on me to show up and win. The fans were looking to me as their big chance for a home success. Champs had put me on the map and my CARIFTA records made me the number one favourite for gold in the 200 metres. For the first time there was pressure, serious stress.

I suppose some of the hype was justified. I was regularly running 21.0 seconds in my school meets, which was impressive for a kid of my age. But then I got to running 20.60 seconds just as the World Juniors approached and I had a sense that something special might happen, it felt like I was tearing up trees. And that’s when Coach McNeil arrived at the training track with a list of the 20 best junior times in the world that year.

Talk about disappointment – I was in sixth place. Sixth.

The two top guys in the US were running 20.47 seconds, 20.49 seconds; some guy was running 20.52 seconds, another 20.55. At first I saw it as a challenge. ‘What the hell is this?’ I thought. ‘I need to step my s**t up.’

But then the doubts crept in. I didn’t want to run, I didn’t want to compete. Losing to those guys would have been bad enough in a foreign stadium, but the thought of losing in a Jamaica vest before a home crowd freaked me out. In my mind I figured it wasn’t worth the hassle.

‘Nah, I don’t think I need to go,’ I told myself. ‘I’m not as good as I thought I was and I’m definitely not going to medal, so what’s the point?’

I explained my thinking to Coach McNeil. He was disappointed and tried to talk me out of quitting, but I wasn’t backing down.

‘Look, I had my butt kicked in the World Youth Champs,’ I said. ‘Going back to that start line and getting my butt kicked again doesn’t seem like a whole lot of fun to me.’

My confidence and self-belief had faded for the first time, I guess because I hadn’t experienced pressure or national expectation before. It was all new. My previous races had been fun, even when I was representing Jamaica at CARIFTA. But this fresh stress, the stress my rivals had experienced at Champs and high-school meets (but normally washed over me), meant my head couldn’t focus on the race ahead.

Coach kept working on me. He told me that I had to go to training camps every weekend because he wanted to see if I could improve my times. I guess it was the right thing to do, but I hated every second of it. All I could think was, ‘I’m going to get my ass whooped if I go out there against those boys. Forget this.’

Every night I moaned at home. After practice I cussed about the World Juniors, my training schedule, and Coach. Man, I was pissed. One night, after I had grumbled to Mom, I sat on the verandah of our house in Coxeath to watch the world go by and chill. It was a spot I always liked to visit when I was feeling a little vexed. It was quiet, and the view stretched beyond the wild bush and the sugar cane and jelly trees, to the mountains of Cockpit County. It was cool, I could clear my head.

As I relaxed, Mom and my grandmother sat me down beside me. They were bored with my bad attitude routine and I knew they wanted to chat about the World Juniors. I didn’t want to hear it, but I couldn’t wriggle away from them because they had positioned themselves either side of me on the chair. I was trapped.

‘Mom, don’t …’

‘Why don’t you give it your all?’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘Go out there and just try. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’

I could feel a lump tightening in my throat. The emotion and the stress was too much. I began to cry.

‘But, Mom, I can’t.’

‘Don’t get upset about it, VJ. Do your best. Whatever you do, we’ll accept it. We’ll be proud.’

I wiped my tears away – I had to toughen up.

‘Oh man, this is what it’s like with parents,’ I thought. ‘If Mom tells me that I’ve got to do something, well, I’m gonna pretty much have to do it now. There’s no way I can let her down.’

The following day, when I saw Coach McNeil at training I told him the news.

‘Coach, I’ve changed my mind about the World Juniors …’

He smiled, the man looked pleased, and Coach McNeil had some news for me, too. He was waving a clipboard around excitedly.

‘Usain, the guys running those fast times this year aren’t coming,’ he said. ‘They were too old for your under-20s category, so you won’t be racing against them.’

Apparently the serious American 200 metre talent had been replaced by younger athletes with much slower times than my 20.60 seconds personal best. My mood brightened. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

‘Hmm, that’s some pretty nice news,’ I thought. ‘Let’s do this!’

When I think about that conversation now, it was another defining time for me. I’d thought about quitting the World Juniors weeks earlier because I’d been disheartened; my 200 metres times weren’t as mind-blowing as I thought and I figured I was going to lose. But once I’d made the move to compete, once I’d realised there was a shot at winning, my attitude changed. I got excited, and as the weeks passed I became more and more hyped.

At training I ran harder, I quit skipping sessions and avoided Floyd’s place for a little while, but the only doubts in my mind were the fans. I didn’t want to let them down, I didn’t want to be a disappointment to them because the World Junior Championships was so much bigger than Champs. It was an international event and my race was due to be shown on TV around the world. I knew I could shoulder the weight of my school’s expectations, but a whole country? That was some heavy stress right there, and it got to me a little bit.

‘Yo, what’s going to happen to me if I blow it?’ I thought during one sleepless night.

No one could blame me for slightly losing my mind – I was a 15-year-old racing in the under-20s category and I would be battling against athletes three or four years older than me. But when I arrived on the track for my first heats, the competition was everything I expected and much more. Forget Champs – from the first event, the stands at the National Stadium overflowed with people. The noise rattled my eardrums as everyone got behind the home athletes, which only added to the strain I was feeling.

Despite my nerves, I cruised through the qualifying heats and semi-finals. I was feeling good about myself. When the time of the final arrived, it was a warm Kingston evening. The air was hot and dry, but I felt pretty chilled. I thought back to Mom and her chat on our Coxeath verandah. Maybe she’d been right, after all? Maybe there was nothing to worry about.

I got changed into my kit. The fastest Jamaican junior I knew, a girl called Anneisha McLaughlin, was racing in the 200 metres final and I decided to walk out on to the track to catch her and some of the other events. I wanted to soak up the atmosphere.

Well, that was a big mistake. As I walked down the tunnel and into the arena I could see the crowd. They were shouting and screaming, waving Jamaican flags and banging drums. At first I figured Anneisha had started her race, so I quickened my step, but once I got to the edge of the track I realised there was no event taking place. I was the only athlete out there.

‘What the hell is this?’ I thought.

Then I heard a chant rolling around the stadium – it was coming from the one stand and moving around like a tidal wave.

‘Bolt! Bolt! Lightning Bolt!’

The fans were singing my name. It was ringing across the track, the noise was crashing around me. And that’s when it hit me: I was the only Jamaican running in the men’s 200 metres final that night; the people who were going wild out there in the National Stadium, they were going wild for me.

‘Bolt! Bolt! Lightning Bolt!’

Well, I was pretty much messed up after that. As it got to the time of the 200 race, my legs went weak, my heart was pounding out of my chest. I didn’t think I’d be able to walk, let alone run. Straightaway, I sat down in my lane as everything went on around me in super slow motion. The other runners stepped out on to the track, they were warming up and stretching; all of them looked super calm, but I could only stare at the fans waving and screaming in the bleachers. Somebody shouted out that Anneisha had finished second in her final, and that heaped even more pressure on me. I was now the only home boy with a chance of getting gold in the World Juniors. My brain went into meltdown.

‘What the hell is this?’ I thought. ‘People are going mad.’

I was scared. ‘What did I do to myself to put me here? I knew this was a bad idea.’ I had never felt that much pressure in my entire life.

‘I’m a 15-year-old, the kids running here are 18, 19. I don’t need this …’

Still, something told me I had to get to work. For starters, my spikes had to go on, but even undoing the laces felt like a major challenge. I tried to get into the first one, but for some reason it didn’t fit. I pulled and pulled at the heel, desperately trying to work my toes further into the shoe. No give. I jammed my fingers in there and loosened the tongue. Still no give. It was only when I looked down at my feet, after two minutes or so of fiddling, that I realised I’d stuck my left foot into my right spike. That’s how nervous I was.

Stress does funny things to people, and I was falling apart. I tried to get up, to stand, to jog, but I was too weak from the nerves, so I sat down again. Everyone else was doing their strides, going through their final routines, but I was wishing for an escape route – something, anything to get me out of there.

It was so weird. Once I’d been called to the blocks I managed to calm myself for a second or two, but then an announcer called out my name over a loudspeaker and the whole place burst into life again. It felt like the roof of the stadium was about to come off with the noise.

‘Oh God …’ I thought. ‘What is this?’

‘On your marks!’

I settled into the blocks and started to sweat, big-style.

I was officially upset.

‘Get set!’

Don’t mess this up …

Bang!

I froze, I was unable to move and I looked plain stupid. I was stuck to the blocks, as if my spikes and hands had been superglued to the track. It took what felt like a second or two before I reacted to the gun, and by then everybody else had fired off down the lanes. I was dead last because my start had been so slow – but not for long.

When I came out, everything changed. I began to move – and fast. I could see the other runners getting closer and closer as I made the corner, smooth like Don Quarrie, and then I hit top speed. After that, I can’t really explain what happened over the next few seconds because I don’t honestly know. All I can say is that it felt as if somebody, or something, was pushing me down the track. There was a guiding force behind me; it was as if a pair of rocket boosters had been strapped to my spikes. Even with my weird style of running, head back, knees up, I passed everybody until there wasn’t an athlete in sight, only the finishing line. Then it dawned on me: I was the World Junior 200 metres champ.

And it was insane.

Everyone lost their minds. There were people in the crowd screaming, jumping up and down and waving banners. Somebody handed me a Jamaican flag. I wrapped it around my shoulders, because that’s what I’d seen Michael Johnson do when he had won gold medals during the Olympic Games for the USA, and then I did something that would change the way I looked at track and field for ever. I ran towards the bleachers and saluted the fans like a soldier paying respect to his captain. It was my first move to a crowd in any race and the look on everyone’s faces as I did it told me it wouldn’t be the last. The energy that bounced back off the Jamaican people was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

‘You know what?’ I thought. ‘Being a World Junior champ feels kinda nice!’

As the celebrations went on around me, I thought about what had happened to me out there, Mom’s chat on the verandah, my spikes on the wrong foot. For a second, I had lost it, my mind had gone, my race had stuttered, but I’d still won. How the hell had that happened? How I had walked out in front of an international crowd and dealt with the pressure? Damn, it all seemed pretty crazy to me.

I had landed as a track and field star. I had found mental strength when most athletes would have freaked. I had shut the jitters out and carried the burden of a nation’s hopes on my shoulders. Even better, I’d come through a champ. I knew that nothing was going to faze me after that. Pre-race nerves were done with; no pressure was going to mess with my mind. How could there be anything more stressful than the start line at the World Juniors in front of a crazy home crowd?

The penny dropped with me about how important confidence was to a sprinter, especially in a short event like the 200 metres where supreme mental strength was often the key difference between myself and some of the other racers in my meets. I knew I couldn’t let a negative thought cloud my judgement ever again, because mental strength was a tool in every race, it was as important as a fast start or a powerful drive phase. There was no opportunity for doubt because the contest was over in the blink of an eye. Distraction for one hundredth of a second might be enough to lose a race.

It was my first step to becoming an Olympic legend. As I walked around the National Stadium track I realised I was an athlete that lived for the moment, like the real superstars lived for the moment – The Big Moment. Whereas ordinary guys worried and quivered when they arrived on the Olympic or World Champs stage, the superstars, the Michael Johnsons and Maurice Greenes of this world, were excited by the pressures and the stresses. They moved up a notch, both physically and mentally. At The Big Moment, their performances rocked bells.

I figured I was capable of channelling that same mental power. The World Juniors had been my first Big Moment and I hadn’t collapsed under the weight of Jamaica’s expectation. During my celebratory salute to the fans, I was already mentally transformed. I was a world champ, I’d become the Lightning Bolt to the planet. It was my greatest ever race. Probably always will be.

* Class One was the under-19s event, Class Two was under-16s, Class Three was under-14s; I could have raced in the third class but I would have won too easily, so Coach McNeil placed me in the group above.

† Jermaine would later go on to win bronze in the 400 metres at the World Junior T&F Championships, set a Jamaican national senior 400 metre record and finish fourth in the 400 metres at the 2011 World Championships.

My winning the Junior Champs was so big that when I got home to Sherwood Content after my gold medal race, I was flown to Montego Bay, where a motorcade was waiting for me.

A motorcade.

Now that was big, ridiculously big. The roads that led home to Coxeath were lined with hundreds of people and, as the car passed, they chased after us, forcing their hands into the open window to touch me. All of them were screaming and shouting my name, yelling ‘Bolt! Bolt! Bolt!’ as they raced down the street. It was nearly as crazy as the reception I’d received back in the National Stadium.

I couldn’t believe it. I knew that Jamaicans had a lot of respect for their sports guys, especially in track and field, but a victory parade was something I hadn’t expected. Still, I guess I should have seen it coming. It was pretty clear that I was the dude of the moment. After my 200 win, I’d picked up silver medals in the 4x100 metre relay and 4x400 metre relay, setting national junior records in both with times of 39.15 seconds and 3:04.06 minutes respectively. Everyone was going wild for me.

That’s when I got a quick taste of what fame might be like. For some stupid reason, I’d decided to go for a walk into the seats with Jermaine Gonzales following my last race. Both of us had wanted to watch the girls’ 4x400 metres final, but the place was still ram-packed. Straightaway I knew I’d made a big mistake because as we tried to find a space everybody wanted to talk to me. And I mean everybody. All over the bleachers, people, strangers, were telling me that I was the future of Jamaican sport. I had never signed an autograph before in my life, but within minutes I must have signed dozens and dozens, hundreds maybe. The scraps of paper kept on coming, thick and fast. It took me two hours to get out of the crowd.

On the morning of my return to Trelawny, it was clear to me that I had become one of the most famous people in Jamaica. My face was all over the newspapers; fans were raving about me in bars. Radio and TV stations hyped me up. Luckily, my head stayed screwed on throughout all the craziness. Mom and Pops had taught me so much about respect that during the motorcade I said ‘Hello’ to everybody, just like I had done when I was little, even though it would have been much easier just to wave. People were getting pushy as they tried to shake my hand, but I kept myself humble. As I said, Dad was so serious when it came to manners. If I’d acted big time in public that day, he probably would have cut me off for good.

It was a different story at school, though. I was young, turning 16, and everybody at William Knibb knew who I was. Kids, students I had never even said ‘Hi’ to before, were telling me I was great. People looked up to me, and not just because I was so tall – I had achieved success on the world stage, which made me a big deal. Even the teachers changed their attitude. Some of them weren’t as tough as they had been before my success in the World Junior Championships. If my test scores were bad or I flunked an essay, they went easy on me.

The relaxed attitude didn’t last long, though. There were only so many tests I could fail, and once Pops got to hear about my poor scores he flipped. I was told that if I blew my end-of-year tests, then the principal, Miss Lee, would make me repeat the grade. That would mean a year of extra school fees, which the family didn’t really want to pay for, not if it could be avoided.

It was decided that I should get a tutor to help me out in the evenings and I was introduced to a guy called Norman Peart. Mr Peart was a tax officer working in Montego Bay and a part-time teacher with a solid reputation, who was previously a graduate of William Knibb and Jamaica College. He also had a history in the 800 metres, so he knew a few tricks when it came to balancing school work with track and field training. A timetable was fixed and we agreed Mr Peart would come around a couple of evenings a week. Between us, we planned on getting my crap together.

But there were distractions to deal with. I was the local superstar, and the girls of Trelawny wanted to hang out with a world champ, which was a cool discovery. Up until that point I had been naïve with the opposite sex. I was a country boy, and living in the sticks meant I had to learn the art of dating for myself, which was hard sometimes. There was nobody to teach me how to impress a girl I’d taken a shine to in class, and we didn’t have magazines telling us how to charm women like they did in America or Europe. If I’d lived in a city like Kingston it might have been different, I could have picked up information by watching the people around me. In Coxeath I had to work out The Game on my own.

Before I go on, I want to explain how it is with dating in Jamaica because, believe me, the scene is pretty different to the way it is in Europe, Australia or the States. In the Caribbean, guys play around a lot, and even though the girls don’t like it, that way of life seems to be accepted for some reason, especially among teenagers. It was the same for me, but I wasn’t as bad as some of the people that I knew, mainly because I didn’t understand The Game that well. Certainly not as well as some of the athletes I’d been meeting on the Champs scene.

Before the World Juniors, my record read like most boys my age – I was inexperienced. By eighth grade I had a serious girlfriend, but that became stressful after I started messing with another girl. Unsurprisingly, I soon got found out. A boy at a school like William Knibb learns pretty quickly that there’s no hiding place, especially when he’s playing with two girlfriends at the same time, from the same playground. I found it impossible – I just couldn’t balance having to look after two dates and I got into a lot of trouble. Believe me, a scorned Jamaican female is a stress.

Things changed after the World Juniors. Suddenly I had an angle. Girls wanted to hang with me because I’d been in every single newspaper in the country and I was the local celebrity. I’d also learned The Game better. I picked up tricks from dudes in the Jamaican track and field team. I could watch the way those guys rolled and the style with which they handled their girlfriends. I soon got more ambitious, I discovered how to date tactically, and rather than seeing two girls from the same school, I would meet with dates from different schools. I think the most I had at any one time was three, and when that happened I thought I was The Man.

I didn’t just misbehave with the girls, I was playing around in other ways, too. One time I even tried ganja, which I know sounds like a pretty messed-up admission coming from an Olympic gold medallist, but straight up it was something I did only once, and I regretted it immediately, even though when I lived out in the country, lots of people smoked the stuff.

I’m not making excuses now, and I’m not condoning it, but that’s just the way it was. If ever I played football in the park with friends, there was always a gang of boys smoking spliff, and one day, as a joint got passed around, I became tempted. I figured, ‘You know what? Give me a hit!’ But as soon as I sucked on the rolled-up cigarette, I hated it. The stuff was horrible and I became tired almost from the second I’d drawn in the first lungful.

The rush hit me hard, I felt dizzy. I thought, ‘Forget this!’ And as I sat there, dazed, I could tell that it wasn’t the road for me to go down. First of all because Pops would have stabbed me in the neck if ever he’d caught me fooling around like Bob Marley, and secondly because I could tell the stuff would make me seriously lazy if I smoked it too much. I was already pretty relaxed, but I could see from the people around me that if I smoked a lot of ganja I would become a waster. Instead, I wanted to be motivated, especially when it came to racing, because racing and winning was so much fun.

As a promising athlete, the JAAA flew me around the globe. Not long after the World Junior Champs, I was invited to collect the IAAF Rising Star Award, an accolade given to the most promising kid in track and field. Talk about a tough geography paper, though. I had to travel to Monte Carlo on my own, which was a disaster because, when I came back, I missed my connecting flight from London. Man, I did not have a clue what to do.

First things first – I went to a lady on the nearest check-in desk and asked for help.

‘Oh no, dear,’ she said, when I asked if I could get on another plane. ‘I’m sorry, we can’t give you a seat just yet …’

‘What the hell is going to happen now?’ I thought. Tears came down. The lady saw my face and became all concerned.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘When this happens, the company puts you up in a hotel for the night and we’ll get you on a flight home first thing tomorrow morning. You’ll be fine.’

I felt relieved, but once I’d checked into my room, I could not sleep. I was so worried about missing my plane the next morning that I decided to sit up all night, my bag perched on my lap, as I desperately tried to stay awake. Half an hour before a shuttle bus was due to take me back to the airport, I was checked out and waiting on a bench outside the hotel lobby, shivering in the rain, staring at my watch. I couldn’t wait to get home.

If that happened today, I’d buy myself another ticket. I’d probably find a party; I might even think, ‘To hell with this! London’s a pretty cool city to hang out in, I’ll stay for a couple of days.’ But that day I was freaked. I was a kid, 16 years old, I had no money, and for a while I thought I was going to be stranded in England for ever with the seriously cold weather and weird food.

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