The world record for 100 meters has been holding for more than 6 years. One hundred is the traditional and most famous discipline of athletics.
Competitions to run this distance have been held since the first Olympic Games. The universality of the distance lies in the fact that it is on it that you can check the
speed of a person so that he can run as fast as possible. As you know, athletics is the queen of sports, and hundred-metering is the most frequent norm in all its forms.
History
Men's races for a hundred meters are held from ancient antiquity. Some historians believe that such competitions can be safely called the first sport. Until the beginning of the 20th century, competitions were held almost without taking into account time. That is, the main attention was paid to the championship of participants in each particular tournament. In most cases, the races were held on a hard ground, which was not always straight or even. The shoes were leather sandals, in which you can rub your legs to the blood with normal walking, not to mention running. Therefore, a modern amateur athlete can easily break the world record for 100 meters, for example, in the 1860s.
100m World Record: Men
Vocational training and comfortable conditions for the competition were created only in 1912, with the advent of the first athletics federation. The 100-meter world record was set by Donald Lippiknott, who covered the distance in 10.6 seconds. Since then, the record has been broken at different intervals. Time decreased literally by a tenth of a second. To a simple layman, this difference seems insignificant, but every athlete knows how difficult it is to clean even the extra hundredths of a second at sprint distances.
The world record for 100 meters running since the 2000s belongs to the Jamaicans. Usain Bolt ran 9.58 in 2009. Prior to this, the record belonged to his fellow citizen Asafe Powell.
The new achievement began to be widely covered in the media, people who were far from athletics spoke about it. Now in society, "Usain Bolt" is synonymous with speed or sharpness.
Women's 100m World Record
Women's 100m race has not as deep roots as men's. But competitions have been held regularly since the 20th century and are part of the official program of the Summer Olympic Games.
Until about the 60s, manual chronometers were used to record the results. They were issued to specially trained judges, but it is completely impossible to exclude the human factor. The results “by hand” differ from real time by about 1-2 tenths of a second, which is quite serious for sprint distances in athletics. The world record in 100 meters 10.9 seconds was set in 1973. But it is not considered official. At the moment, the best result is 10.49, established in 1988.
Men tend to dominate African athletes who not only set world records, but also show better results. In women, the latest records belong to athletes from Germany and the USA.