The 100 metres is the star event in athletics at the Games, which is also the star sport. The fastest man in the world was the American Noah Lyles, by five thousandths of a second over Kishane Thompson, Jamaican, after an Olympic final in which for the first time all eight athletes went under 10 seconds. That barrier was one of the great challenges of sport for more than half a century.
In the early days of swimming, that role belonged to the 100-meter freestyle minute, won by Johnny Weismuller in Paris 1924. That earned him everlasting fame, reinforced by the 12 Tarzan films he made about it. But the 10-second 100-meter barrier was still a mythical barrier in my childhood when a German sprinter came along: Armin Hary, The lightning manHis father had been a wrestler in Berlin in 1936 and there was a book of old illustrations lying around the house which he had read. He was fascinated by the figure of Jesse Owens and decided to succeed him. He trained every night in the forest and practiced incessantly starting off in the hallway of his house: forty a day, five days a week, a thousand a year. His first obsession was to beat Manfred Germar, selected by Germany for Melbourne in 1956 with a time of 10.3s. Armin’s electric-fast starts were suspicious in everyone’s eyes. When he finally beat Germar at the 1958 European Championships in Stockholm, Germar accused him of having stolen the start. They would never reconcile.
On September 6, 1958, a sensational news story shocked the world: Armin Hary had run the 100 meters in 10 seconds in Friedeensafen, Germany! Incredulous, a group of specialists from the United States, which included three men with 10.1 seconds, and another from Japan, whose emperor had promised a gold medal 10 centimeters in diameter and one centimeter thick to the first person to do it, set out to find the cat in the bag and discovered a gradient of 11 centimeters in the 100 meters, one centimeter more than allowed. It was not approved. Armin threw a tantrum.
On 21 June 1960, he ran in Zurich and repeated the time, but it was cancelled for an illegal start. The starter did not give the go-ahead for cancellation, but it was the finisher who decided, under the general suggestion that this time limit was impossible to reach without cheating. After an hour of protests, he was allowed to run again, provided that at least two athletes accompanied him. He succeeded and again scored 10.
He arrived at Rome in 1960 as a star and confirmed his primacy by winning the gold medal, with 10.2 seconds, after a false start. In the evening, the Japanese ambassador gave him the medal promised by Hiro Hito; but in secret, to avoid accusations of professionalism. He also won the gold in the 4x100m and returned to Germany a hero. But a car accident damaged his knee and ended his career.
And the worst was in store for him: when electronic timing was introduced in Tokyo 1964, it was found that manual timing was giving away two tenths of a second, so his best time was reduced to 10.2 seconds. His role in history was suddenly erased. He sank into oblivion.
In Mexico 1968 the challenge was no longer to reach 10 seconds, something that several had done, but to lower it. The conditions were better there: tartan was available, better than ash, and the 2,248 metres of altitude were a great advantage for the anaerobic tests. The one who knew how to take best advantage of this was Jim Hines, who arrived at the final in high spirits. So much so that the night before he escaped from the Olympic Village, met his wife at her hotel, made love and drank champagne: “If you don’t run with that feeling of being the best, whether you are or not, you will never do anything,” he said years later when he revealed the escape.
This was the first final with eight black sprinters, and Jim Hines finally broke the barrier, lowering the record to 9.90s according to an initial measurement, later corrected to 9.95s. His name went around the world.
But things did not go as he had hoped. Those were the Black Power Games with the heroic gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Hines had been one of the few black athletes who did not want to join, but the ensuing uproar enveloped him: “When we returned to the United States, nobody wanted to know anything about us,” he lamented. For the whites he was just another member of the revolt, for the blacks, a submissive Uncle Tom. He left athletics, tried his luck in American football, without success, and survived in anonymity on a small salary as an obscure municipal employee. His record stood until 1983, when it was beaten by Calvin Smith (9.93s).
Jim Hines passed away last year, his glory long gone, like that of Hary, whose last news was that he had sold his shoes and medals to an American collector: “I don’t want them to end up in a second-hand market when I’m gone. And in Germany nobody cares about them.”
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