Carlin Isles is one of the world’s fastest men at the 100 meters but that wasn’t good enough to make the US Olympic team. So he looked for other sports in which to make his mark and settled on rugby sevens. The difference in speed between him and the other players on the field is startling.

I saw this video back in December and didn’t think much of it, aside from “wow, that dude is fast”. But on Twitter the other day, Robin Sloan suggested it was Kottke-esque. Now that I’ve watched it again, I think I know what he was getting at.

People in tech talk a lot about innovation and disruption but there’s a lot of hand-waving that happens when you attempt to pinpoint what those things mean. One of the reasons I enjoy following sports — and in particular the sporting world’s outliers (Messi, Jordan, Billy Beane, Rodman, Magnus Carlsen, Vonn, Belichick, Federer, knuckleball pitchers, Barry Sanders, Serena, etc.) — is that you can see innovation and disruption in action, more or less directly. When Carlin Isles takes a pass from one of his teammates and blazes past the other team, it’s clear he’s playing an entirely different game than the other 13 players on the field and profiting handsomely from it…innovation results in disruption.

(Oh, and it’s not that Isles is necessarily any good at rugby…that remains to be seen. But the combination of speed and size that he brings to the game is a disruptive innovation and opposing teams will have to change the way they play when he’s on the field.)

Update: Like I said, it remains to be seen whether or not Isles has a big impact on rugby, but Jonah Lomu was a star rugby player who had a long-lasting influence on the game:

Lomu in his prime was not quite as fast as Isles (10.13s vs 10.8s in the 100 meters) but at 6’5” and 276 lbs, he had a brutal combination of pace and size. (via @dan_connolly)