Track & Field: The Start’s the Thing

TRACK & FIELD

The way to run the 100-yd. dash, Mel Patton once explained, is to “boom and float” — explode from the starting blocks, drive hard for 50 yds., then “settle down and go for the ride.” Slender and wiry, the World’s Fastest Human of the ’40s rode to a 9.3-sec. 100 — a world record that stood unmolested for 13 years, until Villanova’s Frank Budd clocked 9.2 sec. in 1961.

The World’s Fastest Human today is a junior at Florida A. & M. who rarely booms and never floats. A shifty cut-and-shoot halfback on A. & M.’s football team, Robert Hayes, 20, runs the 100 as if he were cracking an enemy line: head bobbing, shoulders rolling, so pigeon-toed that he often steps on his own feet—a painful experience when he is wearing half-inch-long track spikes. “Starts are my weakness,” Hayes said before last week’s A.A.U. championships in St. Louis. “I don’t get my top speed until I’ve gone 60 yds. But if I ever get a good start, I’ll break a record.”

In the A.A.U. semifinals, Hayes got off to the best start of his life. Rocketing out of the blocks, he leaped into the lead, gaining speed with each driving stride. The track was a special, rubberized asphalt that Hayes found to his liking. “It doesn’t give like cinders,” he said. “You lose about 1/10 second on cinders because your spikes dig in.” As he sliced through the tape 5 ft. ahead of his closest pursuer, astonished officials huddled and checked their watches. Then they announced his time: 9.1 sec.—a new world record. To prove it was no fluke, he ran another 9.1, winning the finals—but that didn’t count, because he had a favoring wind. “Aw shucks,” said Bob Hayes. “I was shooting for 9 seconds flat.”