Which footballers could beat Usain Bolt in 100M?
Not only is the answer no one, but the difference between them is way, way more than you are imagining.
Cristiano Ronaldo once did a Sports Science race against a Spanish sprinter. The sprinter ran the next day at the Madrid Open and did 10.6.
In this 25m race Ronaldo finished 0.30 seconds behind. This would extrapolate to Ronaldo finishing 1.2 seconds behind in a 100m. If Rodriguez was running 10.6 pace (which he wasn’t) this would give Ronaldo a time of 11.8 seconds. However Ronaldo has very poor form and hit top speed by about 15m, which means he would be slowing down the remaining 85m whereas Rodriguez wouldn’t hit top speed until around 50m. So the difference would be greater.
Castrol once did a test on every Premiership player. They had light gates 10 metres apart and measured each player’s fastest 10 metre split. Theo Walcott has devastating speed on the pitch, and he got the fastest split of 0.99 seconds.
This gave him a speed of 10.1 metres per second. Bolt’s fastest split is 0.81 seconds as measured by the IAAF. This is a speed of 12.35 metres per second. In other words, if they were sprinting, Bolt would pull away from Walcott by over a body length in considerably less than a second. He is as fast to Walcott as Walcott is to the average midfielder, the slowest position on the pitch.
If you are talking about footballers in America, NFL players, then Walter Dix once ran a 40 yard dash, timed on film (its on Youtube somewhere) of a 3.8 40 yard. Walter Dix, a professional sprinter, is a slow starter with a high top speed. Yet he is still considerably faster than any NFL player, as the record is 4.2.
Watch some 40 yard dashes of ‘ghosts’ when they overlay two different people doing the dash. Observe the difference between someone running 4.3 and someone running 5.0. This is the sort of difference you would get between a 4.3 and a 3.8 (since the faster you go the more ground you cover in a tenth of a second). So Dix is as fast to Chris Johnson as Johson is to the faster Defensive Tackles.
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