OAKLAND — World records are set and broken, but one milestone will always belong to a kid from West Oakland. Jim Hines, the World’s Fastest Man in 1968, was the first to officially break the 10-second barrier in the 100-meter dash, a time of 9.95 seconds at the Mexico City Olympics that stood for a record 15 years.

“I’m the first man, and I’m the last man to do that,” Hines said. “No sprinter is going to break 9 seconds in the 100 meters. Our hearts are not made to.” This week, as the world watched the Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Hines returned to the track at McClymonds High School where it all began and took some jabs at today’s fastest man, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt. At 69, he’s moving slower since the days local newspapers described him as “Hurrying Jim Hines.”

But he flashes a smile when recalling his heyday at McClymonds, his rise to the top and how it almost didn’t happen.

Early days

Hines was a baseball player at Mack in the early 1960s when track coach Jim Coleman discovered his speed. In those days, Mack and Castlemont High School dominated local track meets and rivaled larger schools in Los Angeles. It was a special era for track and field, said Paul Brekke-Miesner, a student at Castlemont at the time who is now a local sports historian.

“I don’t think we realized at the time what we were watching,” Brekke-Miesner said. “We were watching what turned out to be some real rare and phenomenal track in Oakland.”

Much of the spotlight belonged to Hines. In May 1964, the senior tied a 31-year-old record held by Jesse Owens with a time of 9.4 seconds in the 100-yard dash. The same year, he won the high school state championship in the 100 and 220 yard dash. He went on to Texas Southern University.

Broke and hungry

With the Oakland Tribune and other papers calling him the “World’s Fastest Human,” Hines appeared as one of the United States’ best chances to win gold at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. But fast or not, speed didn’t pay back then.

Leading up to the Olympics, Hines was broke. He had a wife and a baby to feed. NFL teams impressed by his speed and unconcerned that he hadn’t played football since high school were trying to lure him from his true love, running.

“I’d love to compete in the Olympics,” he told the Tribune in December 1967. “But I’ll probably have to sign if I’m drafted for football. It’s a matter of eating.”

“There was a time when I almost didn’t go to the Olympics,” Hines said this week. “If I had signed that contract, I wouldn’t have been able to go. I talked with my coaches and my family members. They said, ‘You only get this once in a lifetime.’ ”

So off he went.

1968 Games

Although Hines ran a manually clocked a time of 9.9 seconds in a race earlier that year in Sacramento, he arrived in Mexico City as an underdog in the 100-meter dash behind fellow American Charles Greene and Jamaica’s Lennox Miller. Undeterred, Hines claims to have had an unusual ritual: The night before the race, he and his wife drank two bottles of Champagne.

The next day, Oct. 14, 1968, Hines made history, becoming the first man to run 100 meters in an official electronic time under 10 seconds. The first time appearing on the screen was 9.89, recorded by a light beam at the finish line. However, Olympic officials adjusted that to 9.95 seconds based on photographic evidence, a slower time that Hines has disputed.

“They said I ran too fast. This is what I heard from officials at the Mexico City Olympics,” Hines said. “So they had to give me a time that was consistent with whatever the Olympic time should have been.”

Nevertheless, the record stood through five presidential administrations, making Hines the World’s Fastest Man for a remarkable 15 years until Calvin Smith broke the mark in 1983, and placing him among the greats of American sprinters. He also won gold in the 100-meter relay.

“We’ve had the greatest sprinters of all time,” he said. “I consider myself super high up on the pole.”

Hines even said he would have topped Bolt’s current world record of 9.8 if today’s technology was around in 1968.

“I’m just being honest and truthful with you,” he said.

David DeBolt covers Oakland. Contact him at 510-208-6453. Follow him at Twitter.com/daviddebolt.