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Bolt can break his own record

TOP SPEED: Usain Bolt from Jamaica, at the front, is the fastest runner in the world.
TOP SPEED: Usain Bolt from Jamaica, at the front, is the fastest runner in the world.

LONDON - Usain Bolt, already the world's fastest man, could lop another 0,18 seconds off his 100 metre sprint world record even without running any faster. It's just a question of getting a few conditions right - and doing the maths.

Luckily for the top Jamaican sprinter, John Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at Britain's Cambridge University, has done the calculations for him.

He's also done some serious sums on high jumping, archery, rowing and 100 or so other sports Barrow feels could do with a little more number crunching.

His mission, he says, is to enrich the understanding of sport and enliven appreciation of mathematics. All at the same time.

"It's about getting some perspective on how far there is to go," Barrow says, ahead of a series of talks on the mathematics behind the Olympics in Cambridge and in London, host city for the 2012 games.

With Bolt, the distance is set - at 100 metres - but there's a lot that could be done with the timing, he says.

Having analysed Bolt's reaction times to the starting gun - which are generally slower than other leading sprinters and often much slower than the 0,1 seconds allowed - the mathematician says that's where the first gain could be.

"The time that people record in the 100 metre sprint is the sum of two parts - one is the reaction time to the starting gun and the other is the actual running time," Barrow says.

"So if Bolt could get his reaction time down to say 0,13 seconds, which is good but not exceptional, he'd make some improvement on his overall record time of 9,58. It may only be few hundredths of a second, but it's certainly room for improvement," Barrow says.

The professor has also worked out the top wind speed Bolt would be allowed within Olympic rules to have helping him along - a maximum of two metres per second - and the optimum altitude at which he could race in thinner, and hence less resistant, air.

Adding them all together, the fastest man in the world could be looking at a new 100-metre world record of 9,4 seconds, without actually running any faster, Barrow says.

"The point I'm trying to make is that we're not going to be reaching the limits of human speed any time soon. And there's no reason to assume Bolt is going to be just shaving fractions of hundredths of seconds off each time. There's scope for some quite big improvements," Barrow says.

Besides Bolt, Barrow has also turned his mathematical mind to scores of other sports and is publishing his thoughts in a new book that is due out this week called 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know About Sport".

For rowing, he has devised a funky equation to help coaches place crew members in fours or eights in the best possible combination to minimise the boat's "wiggle", which Barrow says results from the boat being subjected to alternating sideways forces.

The equation is M = sF-(s+r)F-(S+2r)F+(s +3r)F = 0, and Barrow concludes that in a coxless four, the rowers at front and back should be have their oars to the right, while the two in the middle should have theirs to the left.

For an eight, Barrow suggests the rowers sit in a pattern from stern to bow with their oars stuck out to the right, left, left, right, left, right, right, left to reduce the wiggle, and says he hopes one of the Olympic crews will put his theory into practice at London. - Reuters

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