The fastest man in history arrived in Beijing at 22 with a problem: his stomach couldn’t handle Chinese food.
At training camp, he had tried the local dishes. His body didn’t respond well. So Usain Bolt made a decision no one would recommend to an Olympic athlete: eat only what he knew.
What he knew were McDonald’s McNuggets.
““At first I ate a box of 20 for lunch, and then another for dinner”,” he recounted in his book. The next day, it was two boxes at breakfast, one at lunch, and a couple more at night. With fries and an apple pie for company. All washed down with bottled water.
By his own estimate, he ate about 100 a day for roughly 10 days in the Olympic Village. About a thousand in total. The figure is his estimate, not an exact count. Some calculations put it at between 47.000 and 59.000 calories.
And then came the track.
In August 2008, in Beijing, Bolt ran the 100 meters in 9,69 seconds and the 200 in 19,30. Both were world records. He added a third record with the 4×100 relay, although that gold medal was stripped years later because of a teammate’s doping.
Years later, he joked: ““Wow, I should have won a gold medal for all the food I stuffed myself with”.
There was no secret, no scientific plan. Just a young man nearly two meters tall who trusted the only thing his body would accept and ran like no one else.