From his new memoir, “Faster Than Lightning” (Harper), out next week, four things you didn’t know about Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive:
In Beijing, he ate 1,000 McNuggets.
During the Beijing Olympics, Bolt, then 22, thought that Chinese food was “odd.” So he hit the nearest McDonald’s in search of his favorite food: chicken McNuggets.“At first I ate a box of 20 for lunch, then another for dinner. The next day I had two boxes for breakfast, one for lunch and then another couple in the evening. I even grabbed some fries and an apple pie to go with it,” he writes.
He estimates that during the 10 days he spent in Beijing, he downed 100 nuggets every 24 hours. That equals 1,000 chunks of chicken. “Man, I should have gotten a gold medal for all that chowing down,” he writes.
His signature move wasn’t even his own idea.
“Bolting” is the runner’s go-to celebration, where he pulls his arm back like an archer and aims an imaginary bow at the heavens — but it wasn’t his idea.He first struck this pose when he set the world record in the 100 meters during the Beijing 2008 games. And though it looked off-the-cuff, it was actually planned in advance with a dancer friend from Jamaica.
“I’d made a deal that if I won the 100, I would bust some crazy dance move. It was called ‘Di World,’ ” he writes.
Though the move has been criticized for being unsportsmanlike, it hasn’t stopped the speedster from busting the move every time he wins a race.
He had a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy with his first girlfriend.
Bolt was spoken for when he arrived in Beijing, already dating his first serious girlfriend, Jamaican runner Mizicann Evans, for five years.But after becoming an overnight sensation, he found that the “ladies threw themselves” at him, he writes.
“I was able to get any lady I wanted . . . I could walk into a party and take my pick,” he writes. “I would go into a club and think, ‘Hmm, a’ight, which one? You . . . ? You . . . ? Oh, you! Let’s do this.’ ”
So, how did the couple last?
“We had one rule: If I was doing my thing with someone else and Mizzi didn’t know, then she was cool. But if she found out that something had happened between me and another girl, then that person had to go,” writes Bolt.
The couple has since split.
A baton nearly got him disqualified.
After three first-place finishes at the 2012 London Olympics — one for the 4×100 relay — he decided that gold medals were not enough.He wanted the baton. But the race official looked at him like he was crazy.
“ ‘You can’t have that. We’ll need it,” the official told Bolt.
”Why? The Olympics is over!” Bolt fired back.
The two sparred over the baton in Bolt’s clutches until the official went “wild” and threatened him.
“You’re going to be disqualified if you don’t give me back the baton!” the official said.
Just as Bolt was about to hand over the prized rod, another official came over and insisted that Bolt keep it.
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