Topics: Usain Bolt, Athletics
Usain Bolt has opened up about what former rival sprinter Justin Gatlin did to try and intimidate the Jamaican.
Bolt, 38, is the current world record-holder in the 100 metres (9.58s), 200 metres (19.19s) and 4x100 metres (36.84) races.
He fended off some fierce competitors, including fellow Jamaicans Yohan Blake and Asafa Powell, but there was one rival who stood out from the crowd.
Of course, as ever in sports, when someone is at the top of their game, it is usually because they have a rival pushing them to new levels - examples of this include Manchester City and Liverpool in football, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in tennis plus Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao in boxing.
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For Bolt, it was Gatlin who wanted to take his crown as the fastest man of all time.
“I remember the first time I competed with Justin, he spat across my lane, the first time I met him,” he told High Performance.
“We were in, I think it was Zagreb [Croatia], and we were competing.
“You know when you warm up and you're running out of your blocks? I was walking back, and he was walking towards me, and he kind of spat across the lane in front of me."
In typical Bolt fashion, the vulgar act did not faze him.
“I laughed because I knew what he was trying to do, but for me, it doesn't matter,” Bolt said.
“All that matters is that when we line up and that gun goes, you’d better be ready. Because you're not going to intimidate me by spitting across the lane."
“But that's just who he was, and that's how he was wired because he was in the era before me where it was like that,” he added.
The American Gatlin set his sights on beating Bolt, and even though he won five Olympic medals – including a gold at the Athens games in 2004 - it was the Jamaican who dominated sprinting between the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro games.
Bolt retired in 2017 with eight Olympic golds and eleven World Championship crowns to his name.
The 38-year-old also mentioned how Gatlin’s comments in the build-up to the 2016 edition of the games motivated him.
“I remember watching a video, that he [Gatlin] was on a podcast at the time,” Bolt said.
“And they were saying: ‘Oh, are you going to win?’
“And he said: ‘Yeah, I'm going to win, and then we're going to go on a tour around the world with our gold medals’.
“And that did it for me. It lit a fire, and I was like: ‘Yeah, you're not going to win.’”
