I was surprised to watch Yoshihide Kiryu setting a new Japan 100m dash record at 9.98 seconds on September 9th in 2017. Finally a Japanese athlete broke the 10 second barrier for the first time in Japanese 100m history. Abdul Hakim Sani Brown even made a new Japanese record at 9.97 seconds on June 7th in 2019.

I still remember the shocking moment when Usain Bolt made a world record of 9.69 seconds at 2008 Beijing Olympics. The moment of somebody breaking a 100m dash record really moves me. It makes me wonder how fast human can run in the future.

I made a figure below to see the human history of 100m dash and see how different Japanese records and world records are. The records in the figure below are electronic times.









As of July 13th 2019, Japanese athletes still have not reached a previous world record of 9.95 seconds set by Jim Hines in 1968. It’s amazing how long it takes to make progress even for 0.01 second. Yoshihide Kiryu set his Japan record in 2017, but it took almost 20 years for him to break the former record of 10.00 seconds set by Koji Ito in 1998. Also, it took about 15 years for Calvin Smith to renew the record of 9.95 seconds by Jim Hines. It’s obvious that breaking the previous record is not an easy thing to do. You can see in the figure that the huge drop from 9.69 seconds to 9.58 seconds by Usain Bolt is incredibly exceptional.

Two YouTube videos are attached below if you are interested in the 100m record progress for the world and Japan. You can watch the first video by jumping to YouTube website.

I hope that somebody in Japan will set a new world record someday in the future.





