Jim Hines, legendary US sprinter who broke the 10-second barrier for 100m, dies aged 76

New DelhiJim Hines blazed a trail in world athletics, but if what he achieved in the summer of 1968 is not as widely celebrated as it should be it is because the tumultuous 1968 Mexico Olympics are best remembered for the defiance of black US athletes to protest racism in their country.

The sprint legend and Olympic 100m champion, who wrote a significant chapter in the history of track & field as the first man to run the 100 metres under 10 seconds, died on Saturday at the age of 76, World Athletics said on its website.

Born in Arkansas as the ninth of 12 children, the family – his father was a construction worker and his mother worked in a cannery – moved to California when he was six years old. His impressive speed as a center fielder in the school baseball team caught the eye of a track coach. Joining the Texas Southern University on an athletics scholarship, his rapid progress came under coach Bobby Joe Marrow, the 1956 Melbourne Olympics 100m and 200m champion.

For three years from 1965, it was his great rivalry with friend Charlie Greene that dominated the sprint scene in the US. In 1967, Hines was ranked No.1 in the 100 yards/100m after he had equalled the world record of 9.1 seconds for the 100 yards and 10.0 seconds for 100m.

Hines and Greene were central figures in a sensational day of sprinting at the 1968 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) national championships, since remembered as “The Night of Speed”.

Having won the first qualifying heat at a wind-aided 9.8 secs, he won the first of two semi-finals clocking 9.9 secs (all hand-timed), achieving the first ever legal sub-10 100m. Greene won the second semi-final equalling the brand new world record before both clocked identical, wind-aided 10 secs in the final to end an evening of sensational sprinting -- all in the space of about two-and-a-half hours.

“There will never be another night like it,” Hines was quoted as saying in a 2004 article on the world athletics body’s website to mark a reunion of the protagonists of that June night when three broke the world record of 10 seconds and seven equalled it. “That was the greatest sprinting series in the history of track & field.”

Hines qualified second behind Greene for the 100m at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. With the fires of racial injustice burning among black US athletes – there were calls for boycott before the Games and the iconic Black Power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium – Hines won the 100m gold clocking 9.9 secs at Mexico City’s altitude, equalling his own world record, while the newly installed electronic timing showed 9.95 secs. It was the first legal, automatically timed, 100m under 10 seconds. Greene, hampered by a hamstring issue, finished third.

The world record would stand for 15 years – the longest span for the men’s 100m – until Calvin Smith bettered it in 1983, clocking 9.93 secs, also in the altitude of Colorado Springs. It was a symbol of its enduring quality, and for human endeavour matching Roger Bannister becoming the first to run the mile under four minutes in 1959. As for the Mexico Games itself, Bob Beamon’s “leap of the century” 8.90 metres in the long jump and Dick Fosbury’s high jump victory using his back first technique have hogged the headlines.

Hines’s Olympic record wasn’t bettered until the 1988 Seoul Games (Carl Lewis, 9.92secs). Usain Bolt’s current 100m world record of 9.58 secs, set in 2009, is almost 14 years old.

Hines added a second gold, anchored the US 4x100m relay team to win and a world record.

By 1976, Hines shared the 100m world record with eight others. In 1977, the world athletics body ruled that world records for sprints (100m-400m) must be automatically timed to 100th of a second, making him the sole owner of the record till 1983.

Days after his Olympic triumph, burglars broke into his Houston home and stole many items, including the gold medals. But after Hines placed an appeal in a local newspaper, the medals were returned in an envelope.

With track & field following a strict amateur code then, it was no surprise that Hines signed a professional football contract with the Miami Dolphins in the American Football League (now NFL, or National Football League) as a wide receiver. Although he is regarded as one of the fastest ever in the league’s history, his footballing skills were so poor he was cruelly nicknamed ‘Oops’. After 10 games for the Dolphins, he played one more with Kansas City Chiefs before that chapter ended.

Hines ran competitively into his late 30s, also competing in the professional International Track Association circuit in the early 1970s. He is also said to have worked in the oil rigs near Houston.

He was inducted into the USA Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1979.