Review: Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography

Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography by Usain Bolt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brother gave me this to read, because it's not something I'd normally pick up. I mean, I think Bolt is cool and am as amazed by his athletic feats as anyone, but I can't say I've ever felt any reason to get to know behind the amazing runs better.

But I thought it was a solid book. The blurb tries to play up some hardships from Bolt's life, all "oh it hasn't always been easy, I've suffered injuries and I was in a car crash once", which fell flat if you ask me. The car crash sounded horrible, but the only one who got seriously hurt as a friend of his, and we never see her again after the one chapter that sorta deals with the accident. A throw-away line mentions her making a full recovery, then it's focused more on Bolt's foot injuries. I'm sure that was a traumatic experience that affected him a lot, but it doesn't come off like that in the book.

And it didn't have to, I thought the book was interesting enough on it's own. I don't know, it's something special to get inside the head of someone who was broken several world records and won six olympic medals. Reading about his approach to work-outs and what is going through his had before he runs WAS enough to keep me reading.

In a way I feel maybe it was written too early. I saw on wikipedia that Bolt has announced that he'll retire din 2017, which makes sense since he'll be over 30 then and can't reasonably be expected to keep running the way he has done so far, but why publish the book while he might still be able to perform well, when things could still happen? Though, for someone who hates losing as much as he does, maybe writing a biography that ends with him on top was the only way.

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True story.