
Sprinter Calvin Smith ran the 100 meters in 9.93 seconds, setting a world record in the now-defunct National Sports Festival at Air Force.
A two-time Olympic medalist and three-time world champion, Smith, now 48, of Bolton, Miss., broke Jim Hines’ record by 0.2 of a second. Hines was the first person to crack the 10-second barrier, and his record – 9.95 seconds in a gold-medal dash at the 1968 Mexico City Games – stood for nearly 15 years.
Canadian Ben Johnson broke Smith’s mark by running a 9.83 for a gold at the 1987 world championships in Rome, but his record was rescinded and his medal was stripped by an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) council in September 1989 after he admitted to using stanozolol, an anabolic steroid.
That prompted the IAAF to rule that a pair of runs by Carl Lewis had matched Smith’s record. Lewis recorded a 9.93 in a silver-medal performance in Rome that was upgraded to a gold following Johnson’s admission, and he posted the same time in August 1988 in Zurich, Switzerland.
Smith lost his share of the record Sept. 24, 1988, when Lewis ran a 9.92 in claiming an Olympic gold in Seoul, South Korea. The record has passed through seven hands the past 21 years, and Jamaican Usain Bolt now holds it, running a 9.69 last year at the 2008 Beijing Games.
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