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Books

What makes someone the fastest man on earth?

Usain Bolt has one critical physical advantage, says the pacy memoir Fast as Lightning

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

Faster than Lightning Usain Bolt

HarperSport, pp.298, £20, ISBN: 9780007371419

What makes someone the fastest man on earth? The current tenant of the informal title held by such sporting icons as Jesse Owen and Carl Lewis starts with a version of the pastoral. Here is Usain Bolt as a child of nature, running free in the wilderness near the remote village that was his birthplace in Jamaica, plucking yams from the ground and bananas from the trees, body-building by carrying buckets of water home from the stream, and kept on the straight and narrow by regular ‘whoop-ass’ from his father.

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