Usain Bolt's 9.58 seconds is the fastest 100m ever run

On 16 August 2009, at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt ran the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds - a world record that still stands.

The margin was extraordinary. Bolt took 0.11 seconds off his own previous record of 9.69, set at the Beijing Olympics exactly a year earlier. That is the largest single improvement in the 100m since the start of electronic timing, when records normally fall by hundredths.

To average roughly 37 km/h over the distance, Bolt reached a peak speed close to 44 km/h in the middle of the race.

At 1.95 m tall, Bolt was unusually large for a sprinter, taking fewer strides than his rivals but covering more ground with each one. The run remains the benchmark every sprinter is measured against - and no one has come within a tenth of a second of it since.