[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by Rookiemonster

I was referring to his sprinting time .
Bolt would have beaten American Thomas Burke, the first gold medalist ever, by more nearly 20 meters, or over 60 feet. Jesse Owens? About 21 feet behind.a in 1913 and died in Arizona in 1980 was the most impressive athlete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He won 4 gold medals (100m, 200m, 4x100m and Long jump) and crushed the myth of Aryan supremacy in front of Hitler and the entire Nazi regime. One year before, at the 1935 Big Ten track, he managed to set three world records and tie another one in less than an hour.
Carl Lewis, also born in Alabama in 1961 was the first athlete to equal Owens record in a single Olympics: in 1984 he won 4 gold medals (100m, 200m, 4x100m and Long Jump). He was able to win gold medals in 4 different Olympics, for a total of 9 golds in his carreer. During his career he set world records in 100m, 4x100m and 4x200m and he is still holding the world record for indoor long jump (established in 1984).
Usain Bolt, born in Sherwood Content (Jamaica) in 1986 is the first athlete ever to hold both 100m and 200m world records since fully automatic time measurement became mandatory in 1977. He is currently holding 3 world records (100m, 200m and 4x100m). He is the first athlete to win 6 golds medal in sprint (Carl Lewis won 5 in sprint and 4 in Long jump). Not only did he break records, but he did it by large margins. For example, in 2009 he broke his own world record of 100m (from 9.69 to 9.58, the highest margin since the start of fully automatic time measurements).

That argument is a fallacious one. Human beings do not evolve over a few decades; the tools they have to work with did. You cannot take athletes out of historical context and compare them across eras because training, medicine and nutrition have evolved so dramatically over the decades. In 1924 it was frowned upon to allow professional coaches to train Olympic athletes and the athletes were not full time athletes. Medical techniques were primitive and nutritional concepts were laughably wrong. Today, elite athletes do nothing but train and have access to a coterie of professional trainers, consultants and coaches. Strip Bolt of all of the advances of the last 70-80 years and see where he is; he might very well be the fastest man alive but I do not think that he would have blown by Jessie Owens Secretariat style.