This was posted at another board. It's a little long but still worth a look. He is starting to get noticed as I said he would years ago when I started this thread.
For those of you who don't follow track and field, here's what's been going on:
No white guy has ever broken the 10 second barrier in the 100m dash. Ever.
There have been some mixed-race guys who have done it, and some completely white guys who have done it with huge, hurricane force illegal tailwinds (any run aided by a tailwind greater than 2.0 m/s is officially labelled as "wind aided" and doesn't qualify for the recordbooks), but no white guy has ever run a wind-legal sub-10 second 100m dash ever in the history of this planet. Ever. For decades and decades, several have come pretty close. But no white guy has ever actually done it, and the longer and longer white guys have tried and failed to do it, the more and more hype has built up around this now infamous "10 second white-guy-barrier".
Recently, however, all signs are pointing towards history about to be made, the barrier about to be broken:
For the past few seasons, a tall, skinny, white teenager named Christophe Lemaitre, has been improving steadily, and massively in the 100m dash with each new season.
He is still just 19 years old, and will turn 20 later this week (sprinters typically don't hit their physical prime until around age 25-28, so he will most likely continue getting faster and faster each year up until then (injuries aside that is, obv)).
To give you an idea of his meteoric progression as a 100m sprinter over the course of the past 4 years, I will show you what his fastest wind-legal 100m time of the season was for each season from 2006 till now:
2006: 10.96 with a 1.2 m/s tailwind (he had turned 16 just a month before this race)
2007: 10.53 with a 0.8 m/s tailwind (he had turned 17 just a month and a half before this race)
2008: 10.26 with a 1.8 m/s tailwind (he had turned 18 just a month and a half before this race)
2009: 10.03 with a 0.2 m/s tailwind (he had turned 19 just a month and a half before this race)
Furthermore, he went to the track and field World Championships in Berlin last year, and most likely would've gone sub-10 there, but unfortunately he f**ked up and got DQ'd for false start and thus missed the opportunity.
That said, don't get carried away and assume that his time progression with each new season is going to keep continuing at this quarter-of-a-second-improvement-per-season rate in the future on and on like this till he's running 8 second 100m dashes when he's in his mid 20's or anything, lol, it doesn't work like that, the seasonal progressions become much much smaller and smaller for the most part once you are down at/below the 10 second mark obv, you don't just keep improving by a quarter of a second each year till you are running 7 second 100m dashes when you're in your late 20's obviously, lol, but I think even the biggest track n00bs comprehend that.
Now, one other last thing you need to understand before I show what he's done so far in the 2010 season, to get a better feel for how this works, is the way sprinters get faster over the course of the season within each track and field season, due to them being at their slowest at the start of the season, since they've been sitting on their ass, not training or racing at all during the whole off-season, and thus are at their fastest at the END of the season, since they've been training and racing for many months straight by that point and are thus at their fastest, then, at the end of the season, and much faster by then than they were at the start of the season, obv.
To give you guys a feel for how much slower sprinters are at the start of a season than they are at the end of that same season, I'll post his season opener results for 2007, 2008, and 2009, and you can compare that to what his fastest times were (listed in the list above) for those respective seasons and see how much faster these sprinters are at the end of the season compared to the start of the season:
2007: He ran a 10.82 into a 0.6 m/s headwind for his first race of that season
2008: He ran a 10.40 with a 1.1 m/s tailwind for his first race of that season
2009: He ran a 10.26 with a 1.9 m/s tailwind for his first race of that season
So, as you can see, he was 0.29 seconds slower at the start of the 2007 season than he was at the end of it, 0.14 seconds slower at the start of the 2008 season than he was at the end of it, and 0.23 seconds slower at the start of the 2009 season than he was at the end of it. And that's not even taking wind into account. His 10.26 season opener in 2009 was with a 1.9 m/s tailwind, which converts to a 10.36 had there been no wind, whereas his 10.03 with a 0.2 m/s tailwind at the end of that season converts to a 10.04 had there been no wind, so taking wind into account, he was actually more like 0.32 seconds slower at the start of the 2009 season than he was at the end of it. Etc.
Anyway, so basically, as you can see for yourself, these guys run a lot faster towards the END of the seasons than they do at the START of the seasons. This is normal, and is how it goes for the vast majority of sprinters. It is extremely rare for a sprinter to be faster at the start of the season than he is at the end of the season, unless he gets injured. or overtrains or undertrains, or gets huge tailwinds in all the races at the start of his season and huge headwinds in all the races at the end of that season, etc.
So, now that we've covered all that, and you have a pretty good understanding of how this sh*t works more or less, here's how the start of his 2010 season has gone so far:
May 1st, 2010: 10.09 for his season opener with a 1.0 m/s tailwind (converts to 10.14 if there had been no wind, so, .22 seconds faster than the zero-wind-converted-time of his 2009 season opener since his converted time for the 2009 season opener was 10.36)
May 9th, 2010: 10.24 into a 2.2 m/s headwind (converts to a 10.09 if there had been no wind)
May 23rd, 2010: 10.03 with a 0.6 m/s tailwind (converts to a 10.06 if there had been no wind)
So, as you can see, if he doesn't get injured, he is almost certainly going to go sub-10 VERY soon, as in, THIS SEASON-soon (unless he gets super unlucky and has huge headwinds in his big, late season races in July/August/September)
Hell, he might even do it in his very next race, he's SO so close already. For example, if he would've had a 1.4 m/s tailwind in his last race he would've run a 9.99 in it instead of a 10.03, and that would've been wind-legal too, since the max tailwind you're allowed to have is 2.0 m/s. So, with a decent barely-legal tailwind he's ALREADY fast enough RIGHT NOW to go sub-10. And he's only going to get faster and faster in the following months as he gets later and later into the season (unless he gets injured obv). So it's really just a matter of time (no pun intended) and luck at this point as to when he does it, with it looking very likely it'll be THIS SEASON, and quite soon at that.
So now with Usain Bolt down with an achilles injury, and Tyson Gay down with a hamstring injury, and Jeremy Wariner sucking hardcore at the 400m now, and LaShawn Merritt banned from running the 400 since he got caught using PEDs, the only big name sprinter running right now is Asafa I-for-I-ALWAYS-Choke-At-Olympics-and-World-Championships-Finals-But-Do-Great-In-Smaller-Lower-Pressure-Races Powell. Powell is actually having a GREAT 2010 season so far, and looks like he very well might dip quite deep into the 9.6's by the end of this season, now that the pressure is off him, but even so, unless he breaks that 9.58 world record, nobody other than avid track and field fans like me is really going to care about it or even hear about it (which is pretty f**ked up btw, lol, considering what a truly mindblowing time a wind-legal 9.6-low would be if he actually ran one at the end of this season, which he really might, given how great of a start he's had so far this season), basically all the spotlights are going to be pointed at Christophe Lemaitre when he becomes the first white guy ever to break the 10 second barrier.
And what's more, Christophe Lemaitre isn't some ripped to shreds 26 year old white dude in the physical prime of his life right now or anything close to it. He's a tall, skinny, white TEENAGER with crappy form. This is the exact OPPOSITE of optimal for sprinting, so he has TONS of room for improvement since he still needs to get:
1. Older and thus closer and closer to the physical prime age for human sprinters which is around 25-28 years old, not 19 years old.
2. Buffer/stronger, instead of totally skinny and non-buff like he is right now.
3. Good running form, instead of having sh*tty running form like he does right now.
So, while being the first white guy to break the 10 second barrier will be what he'll be most known for in the immediate future, I strongly doubt it'll be the pinnacle of his career by any means. This guy looks like he has the potential to be VERY very fast in the years down the road, and not just "for a white guy" but even for a world class sprinter. Barring catastrophic injury, he looks like he will be capable of making it to the finals in the 2012 Olympics, and then when he's in his physical prime as a 26 year old in the 2016 Olympics in Rio, he could have a very real shot of not just making it to the finals, but also of winning a medal in it.
