The race to succeed Usain Bolt: Erriyon Knighton, Letsile Tebogo and the junior sprint world records
It’s been 13 years since Usain Bolt set his senior men’s world records in the 100m and 200m. And while nobody yet has threatened to break those, these young sprinters are as fast, and even faster, than he was at the same age.
Athletics
At the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt set the 100m and 200m world records that stand to this day.
Bolt was 22 years old for both of those races - with his marks of 9.58 and 19.19 achieved in the days leading up to his 23rd birthday.
Since then, nobody has been able to match the fastest times in history, as Bolt’s legend grows stronger by the year.
However, the young generation racing today is in historically fast form, particularly two young sprinters who have ambitions for gold at Paris 2024.
The USA’s Erriyon Knighton (age 19) and Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo (age 20) are now the 200m and 100m junior world record holders respectively and both can stake a claim to be as fast, if not faster than the great Jamaican was at the same age.
Erriyon Knighton and the race for the 200m world record
Of the two prodigies, Knighton has the clearest evidence of being faster than Bolt at the same age.
The 19-year-old is still running in his final year as a junior, yet has already achieved multiple times that are faster than Bolt’s greatest U-20 marks.
Knighton now holds 11 of the top 12 junior 200m times in history, with Bolt’s only place in that dozen a joint-tenth fastest time of 19.93 seconds set in 2004.
In fact, Knighton’s best-ever 200m time of 19.49 seconds makes him the fifth-fastest male in history, with only Bolt himself, Yohan Blake, Noah Lyles and Michael Johnson ahead of him in the senior rankings.
Knighton has also now broken two of Bolt’s junior world records, with both the U-18 (19.84) and U-20 (19.69) taken from the great man himself, while his official fastest mark of 19.49 has not yet been ratified.
And he has no doubt in his mind that he has what it takes to break the senior men’s world record, telling Olympics.com: “I actually want to go sub-19”.
Aside from fast times, Knighton has also proven his ability to rise to the occasion, upgrading the fourth he achieved at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, in 2021, to an impressive bronze in front of his home crowd at the Oregon 2022 World Athletics Championships.
With Paris 2024 scheduled to take place when he is 20 years old, LA 2028 when he is 24 and Brisbane 2032 when he is still only 28, the young American has plenty of years ahead of him to fulfil his immense promise.
Erriyon Knighton’s fastest U-20 200m times vs Usain Bolt's
Letsile Tebogo: the fastest young 100m runner in history
While it’s easy to make a direct comparison between Knighton and Bolt in the 200m, the 100m sprint - often said to be the blue riband event of track & field - is harder to judge.
Bolt posted no official 100m times as a junior, so we can only guess what he could have achieved before he turned 20.
By 22, however, the Jamaican was in full swing setting his fastest-ever time of 9.58 in Berlin.
But the fastest junior 100m recorded today was set by Letsile Tebogo, a Botswanan prodigy who is only now racing in his first year in the senior ranks.
Tebogo’s 9.91 seconds from August 2022 makes him only the third junior to run under 10 seconds. However, his dominance over the distance runs deeper than that one effort.
Tebogo now holds the three fastest junior times in history, all of them set between April and August of last year, demonstrating the type of consistency he will require when he races on the senior stage.
This year, Tebogo hasn’t yet found the type of form that saw him dominate the juniors in 2022. His fastest run so far is a relatively leisurely 10.09 which places him 56th on the top 100 list of senior men’s times currently topped by Kenya’s Ferdinand Omanyala with 9.84.
He also lags behind another talented youngster, Terrence Jones of the Bahamas, who at 20 has already set a time of 9.91 in 2023.
However, if Tebogo continues to develop at the rate he has been, don’t be surprised to see him threatening the podium in this year’s final at the World Athletics Championships and perhaps even battling for honours at Paris 2024, where he will be just under two years younger than Bolt was when he set his world records.
One thing is for certain, with these young guns putting down historically fast times in the 100m and 200m, the future of sprinting has life beyond Bolt.