What makes someone the fastest man on earth?

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.

But nature needed nurture, and life suddenly became more serious. ‘The Champs’, a national competition for schoolchildren which had a profile equivalent to the Cup Final in Britain, was Bolt’s launch-pad. He acquired a savvy coach in Glen Mills and he submitted himself to a training programme which often left him spent and vomiting by the side of thetrack, a victim of recurrent pain in his ankles, tendons and legs, compounded his scoliosis, a spinal malady.