20th May 2016 – Usain made his eighth visit to the Golden Spike meeting in Ostrava and won for the eighth time there. He posted a time of 9.98 secs in the 100m to win by 0.2 seconds. Event report from iaaf.org –
World and Olympic champion Usain Bolt shaved a few hundredths from his season’s best to win the 100m in 9.98 (-0.4m/s), his eighth victory at this meeting.
At the pre-event press conference, the Jamaican superstar stated that he was in shape to run 9.8 if the weather was good. With the thermometer reading 22C, conditions were certainly far more conducive to fast times than last year’s meeting, but Bolt may have been capable of a quicker time had he been pushed all the way. As it was, his nearest challenger, Ramon Gittens of Barbados, finished 0.23 adrift.
“My first 40m was kind of sluggish,” said Bolt. “I could tell that the power behind my start wasn’t good, and that’s why I was shaking my head at the end of the race.
“I’m happy that I came out injury free. We have a lot of work to do, but we’ve got a couple of months to do it, so we’ll be fine. I need more races; the more I run, the faster I’ll get and the more fluid I’ll be.
“It’s a very big year for me,” he added. “This will be the year that I’ll really top off my legendary status.”
World and Olympic decathlon champion Ashton Eaton had been set to line up against Bolt in the 100m, but the US all-rounder picked up a slight quad injury when competing in the long jump earlier in the evening.
