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Usain Bolt
Usain Bolt became the first man to hold both the 100m and 200m world records simultaneously while also holding all three Olympic sprint golds — 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay — at three consecutive Olympics, 2008, 2012, and 2016, a "triple-triple" no sprinter had ever approached before him. His 100m world record of 9.58 seconds, set at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, remains untouched more than 15 years later, and his 200m mark of 19.19 seconds from the same meet has proven similarly durable against a generation of sprinters who've trained specifically to chase it. Standing 6-foot-5, Bolt was considered physically unconventional for a sprinter — most elite sprinters run shorter and more compact — and his ability to combine that height with an explosive start and top-end speed reshaped what coaches believed was possible for a sprinter's build. Nicknamed "Lightning Bolt" for both his name and his signature lightning-pose celebration, Bolt retired in 2017 having lost a single individual 100m final at a global championship in nearly a decade of competition, a level of championship-meet consistency that, combined with his world records, is why he's almost universally cited as track and field's greatest sprinter.
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Carl Lewis
Carl Lewis won nine Olympic gold medals across four consecutive Games, from 1984 to 1996, matching Jesse Owens's feat of winning both the 100m and long jump at a single Olympics in 1984 before going on to win the long jump at four straight Olympics, a streak of individual event dominance spanning 12 years that remains unmatched in the sport. His 1988 Seoul 100m victory came under unusual circumstances — Lewis finished second to Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who was stripped of the gold days later after testing positive for steroids, elevating Lewis to the title in one of the most consequential doping scandals in Olympic history. Lewis's long jump consistency was as remarkable as his sprinting — he won 65 consecutive long jump competitions across a 10-year span in the 1980s and early 1990s, a win streak in an individual field event that's rarely discussed alongside his gold medal count but that historians consider just as statistically dominant. Lewis's final Olympic gold came in 1996 in Atlanta at age 35, in the long jump, making him one of the oldest athletes ever to win an individual Olympic track and field title and capping a career that the IAAF later named "Sportsman of the Century" in recognition of its sustained breadth across two different events.
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