by Usain Bolt
‘See, here’s the thing, Mr Peart,’ I said. ‘I know that if I go to the States, people might never hear of me again, they might burn me out over there. I want to stay in Jamaica.’
Mr Peart was cool, he saw my point of view. The Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association were keen for me to stay too; they shared my view that a gruelling American competitive schedule might hinder my development. So in 2003 I was enrolled at the Kingston High Performance Centre, an IAAF and JAAA training facility in the city with full-time coaches paid to develop promising athletes.
It was a pretty cool place. The IAAF had set up the centre, and others like it around the planet, because it was keen on improving the quality of track and field worldwide. The aim was to raise the standards in sprints and hurdles, distance events, throws and jumps in countries such as Jamaica. The centre in Kingston, which was based at the University of Technology, focused mainly on sprints and hurdles. It was an ideal base for a Jamaican athlete like me who wanted to stay closer to home.
Because of my track record the High Performance Centre was happy to take me on, but I then had to find somewhere to live in Kingston. After a few meetings, Mr Peart was able to transfer his work to a tax office in the city, and it was agreed I could move into digs with him, so my Mom and Dad could rest easy about my welfare. From there we decided he should also manage my career. I was officially a pro athlete.
Wow, talk about a change of scene. When I got to Kingston my world transformed overnight. It was awesome. I was a country teenager living in the big city and suddenly I could party every evening if I wanted to. And man, did I want to! I was away from Pops for the first time and, despite my new vocation, track and field took a back seat to fooling around. It was a huge change of scene.
In Sherwood Content I didn’t get to party because Dad would never allow it; he was always telling me to stay in the house. If ever he did allow me a night out, he always held me to a stupid curfew, like 10 p.m. In Kingston there were a whole load of temptations – clubs, parties, fast-food joints like KFC and Burger King, and at first Mr Peart tried to keep me indoors. But he didn’t have the same iron rule as Pops, so I would always go out and play until the early hours. In Kingston I was off the leash.
Dancing was my thing. There were two clubs in town, the Asylum and the Quad. The Asylum was more like a downtown place, so there was much more talking and conversing. It was the biggest club in the city and there was always a crowd waiting to get in. The Quad was more uptown, it had four floors and each level played different music, from bouncing hip hop to reggae, and that meant it was all about the dancing. I was always at the Quad. After a few months, I didn’t even pay to get in because the guys on the door got to know me pretty well, I was in the line that much. It also helped that a lot of people still recognised me from my success in the 2002 World Juniors. Sometimes the bouncers used to allow me into the club through a fire escape round the back. I would go up the stairs, knock on the door and someone would always let me in for free.
I loved it in the Quad because it was the place in Kingston to get it on. On the dance floor I used to move and sweat, I’d rip my shirt up and get carried away; there were dance battles. People used to do the hip hop move ‘90s Rock’ and a dance called ‘Nuh Linga’, where the best movers would clash to see who had the sharpest styles. But the dance I really loved the most was ‘Whining’, a move which basically involved a guy and a lady dancing real tight. Believe me, it was full on.
See, in Jamaica we don’t dance like Europeans, we dance close. Together. We grind on each other. What happens is that a guy grabs a girl from behind and pulls her in, the pair of them moving to the music. In a hot club it gets sweaty, but when a guy dances with a girl he likes, it’s fun as hell.
That was only half the story, though, because when carnival season came around in March my mind was blown. That time was just ridiculous to me – still is. The parties were crazy and there was full-on Whining everywhere I looked, but what set carnival parties apart from normal club nights was the paint. As people danced, they threw buckets of the stuff around until the whole club was covered in different colours. The first time I saw it in Kingston, I couldn’t believe it. People were partying full on, Whining, drinking, dancing, rubbing paint all over one another. It was pretty much sex, actually.
How the hell was I supposed to concentrate on my track and field career with all of that going on?
***
I didn’t drink – maybe a Guinness or two when I went out, but popping bottles and getting drunk definitely wasn’t for me. Still, when it came to training I was always tired. Partly because I was out at the Quad quite a lot, often for as long as the DJ played cuts, but also because I was working with a new coach called Fitz Coleman, the head trainer at Kingston’s High Performance Centre.
Coach Coleman had a strong reputation. He was a respected trainer for the Jamaican Olympic track team, and his previous athletic successes included Richard Bucknor, who had competed in the 1992 Olympic Games in the 110 metres hurdles, and Gregory Haughton, a 4x400 metres bronze medallist in the 1996 Olympic Games. With the 2004 Olympics coming around the following year, it was figured he would be a pretty good match for my talents. But as soon as we began working together at the High Performance Centre in October 2003, my body went into shock. I had never known a training programme like it, and because my work ethic at William Knibb had been so relaxed, I struggled to keep up. I hadn’t built up any strength, not enough to cope with a serious athletic regime, anyway.
A pro athlete’s training always starts with a hard background programme, and as we prepared for the beginning of the 2004 season, I discovered that a sprinter’s life was tough – really tough. At high school I was able to get away with a lot in training. I could slack off sometimes, or skip the occasional session and still win championships because my raw talent was so great. Most of the time, I was only ever running four or five reps of 300 metres in training. At pro level, I found there would be no room for laziness.
A plan was laid out for the season, and it was decided I would focus on the 200 metres because it was my strongest discipline. But the training seemed more like a 400 metres programme to me, and Coach Coleman had me running 700, 600 and 500-metre runs all the time. The longer runs were a painful surprise and my body just died. My muscles ached, particularly my back and hamstrings, which seemed close to straining most of the time, and I hated waking up in the morning because that’s when I reacted to the work the most. I was in agony; everything felt wrong.
Straightaway, I was complaining. ‘Yo, I can’t do this training, Coach,’ I moaned. ‘It’s ridiculous. I’m not used to this style.’
But Coach Coleman pressed ahead. He was a serious guy, quiet and calm, but a man who demanded respect at all times. He was very much the boss, and while he never screamed or shouted at his athletes, there was no room for discussion. Because his programme had worked so many times in the past, he believed it would work with me. Out of desperation I suggested that maybe he should converse with some of my old coaches from William Knibb, just to find out how I worked best. No chance. Coach Coleman believed in his system, and no amount of complaining from me was going to change that.
Damn, it hurt. I explained how it was to Mom and Dad; I explained to Mr Peart that I was a square peg being forced into a round hole, but none of them would listen to me – they thought I was slacking. I was told that my workload had increased because I was a professional, and that I had to train harder if I wanted to succeed. I sucked it up.
‘A’ight, but if I get injured, it’s on you,’ I said. ‘I’ve told you I can’t do this. It’s putting too much hurt on my body.’
Pops was not having it.
‘Bolt, just do it!’ he said.
I knew the programme was taking its toll on me. I had been running fine before and the pain in my back and hamstrings had only started under the new routine. The training was putting my body under serious pressure. I could also tell that the other kids in the Centre
were getting a better deal with their coaches. They seemed to be happier, to be having fun, maybe because they had worked harder in high school and the work came easily to them. I might have been running fast times but I was envious because I wanted to have fun, too.
One guy stood out to me. Coach Glen Mills was a trainer I’d liked the look of. I’d seen him around the Jamaican junior team working the other sprinters and he seemed to really know what he was doing – and to listen to the athletes he was working with. But, then, everyone knew that Coach Mills was the best in the business. He had trained the Saint Kitts and Nevis sprinter Kim Collins to a 100 metres World Championship gold medal in 2003 and all the High Performance Centre athletes had heard the stories about his background.
For starters, Coach Mills had never built a track and field career of his own. When he was a kid at Camperdown High School in Kingston during the 1960s, he didn’t have the talent to be a sprinter himself, but the passion for the sport was there, so he started working with his athlete friends at school. His skills were developed and he was earmarked as a trainer with potential. As he improved his style, a full-time position was made available to him at the school, and Coach Mills’s first success came when he helped Raymond Stewart to the silver medal in the 4x100 metres in the 1984 Olympics.
Camperdown’s athletics programme was soon nicknamed ‘The Sprint Factory’, and because the man was seriously dedicated, he picked up training techniques from Herb McKenley. There were enrolments on specialist courses in places as far away as Mexico and the UK as Coach Mills became obsessed with how fast a man could run. In fact, his work was so highly regarded that the JAAA later asked him to work with the national team for the CARIFTA Games. It wasn’t long before he was made a national coach and had started his own sprint track and field facility, the Racers Track Club, which trained out of the University of the West Indies, in Kingston.
When I first saw Coach Mills, he definitely didn’t have a sprinter’s look. His belly was round and he never wore a tracksuit; instead he dressed in smart pants and a shirt as he watched over his athletes. He was a bear of a man, with a bald head, greying streaks of hair in his beard and narrow eyes that seemed to stare into an athlete’s soul. I could tell straightaway that he had the brains to read his racers, plus a passion to push them hard. Just by watching him with the other sprinters, I knew that he was a guy who could get the best out of me. When his kids talked, Coach Mills listened.
One day at the gym, I was standing with some friends, complaining about my training schedule when Coach Mills came nearby. He was working with another athlete.
‘It is not happening with my programme,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s working, I don’t want to train that way any more.’
Coach Mills was moving my way.
‘Yo, I want to work in a programme like yours,’ I said, pointing at him. I was being cocky.
He looked me up and down and pulled a face like I was crazy, out of my mind. Then he walked away without saying a word. It was an expression I’d come to see quite a lot over the years.
As the 2004 season started, I couldn’t give a crap about the Athens Olympics. I wasn’t thinking about going to Greece, the home of the greatest championships on earth, or winning medals like Michael Johnson at the Atlanta Games. In my mind there was a bigger prize at stake. The World Junior Championships were being held in Grosseto, Italy, and I was desperate to defend my 200 metres title.
Oh God, I suffered for it, though. My training sessions didn’t let up and from October through to February I covered every inch of ground on the schedule. There were laps and laps of 500 metres, 600 metres and 700 metres; day after day, week after week. Sure, I was stronger, I had more endurance for real, but the work was inflicting some serious pain on my body, especially around the spine. At times it felt as if a fork had been stuck into my lower back and my hamstrings were being twisted around its teeth like spaghetti.
Another worry was that I hadn’t completed any sprint work, not the short, sharp bursts a 200 metres runner needed to sharpen his form. I’d wanted to burst out of the blocks like a bullet at the World Junior Champs and I needed my corner training to be just perfect, but my sessions were focused on background work rather than speed. When the time came to move into competitive races in early 2004, I hadn’t done any transitional work in the programme, and even with my inexperience I knew we were making a risky move. My body wasn’t being given time to adjust to the intense bursts of speed I would require in the forthcoming meets and I felt stressed that the sudden change might screw me up.
Still, when the CARIFTA Games came around in April, I surprised everybody by breaking the 200 metres world junior record with a time of 19.93 seconds. Wow! When I saw the clock I knew it was a ridiculous time; everyone did. I’d shaved 0.14 seconds off the previous record and everybody around me was hyped: Mom, Pops, Mr Peart and, of course, Coach Coleman. My performance had given them all the evidence they needed to silence my grumbling. I was told the training schedule had been successful. The programme was right and I was wrong, clearly.
Thing is, I actually felt alarmed. I knew my body, and there was no way I should have held the capacity to run a time as crazy as that, not without sprint training. And it was a crazy time; not many people ran a faster 200 metres in 2004 at junior or seniors level, and I was only a 17-year-old kid.* Straightaway, it dropped with me that my new world junior record had nothing to do with the work I’d been doing. I had broken that time on raw talent alone.
That news might have pleased a lot of athletes, but I was unhappy for days after the CARIFTA Games. I knew something wasn’t right with my training programme, that I was in serious pain, but who could I complain to? Whenever I moaned, Mr Peart told me that my increased workload was something a young pro like me would have to live with.
‘Your CARIFTA time proved the training schedule right!’ he’d say, ‘It’s working!’ But I wasn’t buying it.
Sure enough, two weeks later, I injured myself in practice. I remember the incident clearly because just before it happened I was on the side of the track, watching, as some kid dropped to the floor clutching his leg in agony. He had blown a muscle during a 400 metres run and it seemed like the strangest thing to me.
‘What the hell?!’ I thought. ‘I didn’t know people actually got hurt in training.’
Not 10 minutes later, I was in the same messed-up state, falling to the ground and holding my leg. I had torn a hamstring during a fast lap of the track and, man, did it hurt. My muscle twanged and a sharp pain grabbed at the back of my thigh and knee. I was in agony, I could barely walk off the track and as I waved out for help, the anger bubbled up inside. I felt pissed at the schedule, pissed at Mr Peart for telling me I had to suffer the pain, pissed at everybody for not listening to my complaints. I went home and called up my parents straightaway. They were upset, and Dad even tried to apologise, but I was too angry to care.
‘Don’t even try to say you’re sorry,’ I said. ‘I told you something wasn’t right with this work.’
The defence of my World Juniors title was under threat. I was gone, shot, and everything went downhill from there. I was told to spend weeks resting and recuperating, which was a serious drag. Then I had to strengthen the busted muscle in training with different exercises and drills, taking care not to damage my hamstring even more. The rehabilitation took months. All the way, a nagging voice in my head told me that I’d fallen seriously behind. I got grouchy. Some days I feared I might never get my fitness back.
There’s something the training manuals don’t tell an athlete about injuries in track and field: they’re about self-discovery as well as recovery; learning the mind is as important as understanding the body. Pain thresholds, patience and inner strength are things that can’t be found in a running magazine. Instead, a sprinter had to learn those things alone, through experience, and as I healed, I learned a pretty important fact about myself – in times of physical stress, I picked up doubts.
Injury, e
ven just a tight muscle or nagging back pain, asked questions. It said, ‘Yo, Bolt, can your body handle coming off that corner like a slingshot?’ Or, ‘Are you going to survive bursting out of the blocks that hard?’
Full fitness, the kind I’d previously experienced following my success in the World Juniors, had given me a feeling of invincibility. There was a sense that I could win any race I wanted. No athlete in the world intimidated me on the start line, not if I was 100 per cent ready, but my injury had drained that confidence and once I was fit enough to run again, negative thoughts dogged me in every training session.
I tried to put it to one side and focused on getting my fitness back. I worked through the pain and the stress, but there was another killer blow around the corner. Coach told me to forget the World Junior Championships – he figured that I wouldn’t be ready. Talk about a bummer. All year I had been psyched about running in Italy, because defending my title was a huge deal. Winning in Kingston had been such a wonderful experience that I’d wanted to do it again, especially as my CARIFTA time had, at that point, made me faster than every senior on the planet that year.
It wasn’t my first disappointment in track and field. The previous year I’d wiped the floor with all the senior guys in the trials for the 2003 World Championships proper – the real deal – which were being held in Paris. I was the reigning World Youth and World Juniors champ and, despite my inexperience at the age of 16, I was able to match the established runners, too. That had got me to thinking, ‘You know what? Maybe I can start pushing myself at the highest level …’
I wasn’t stupid – I didn’t believe for one second that I was going to win gold medals in my first major professional meet, but I figured that if I could set a personal best, maybe there was a chance I might show up in the final. But when the World Champs came around, I was struck down with conjunctivitis, or ‘pink eye’ as we called it in Jamaica. I was forced to rest up and my training was put on hold. The JAAA then decided I was too inexperienced to compete in my first big event without being conditioned properly and, even though they took me to Paris for the experience of a big competition, I was unable to race. I felt devastated.