Usain Bolt's top speed was about 44.7 km/h, or 27.8 mph, measured during his 9.58 world record in the 100 metres at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. That is roughly 12.4 metres per second. The part that gets left out is where it happened: somewhere between 60 and 80 metres into the race, for a stretch of about twenty metres. The number everybody quotes happens for about twenty metres, and none of those metres look like a football play.
Updated November 2026.
The splits below come from the biomechanics report the IAAF (now World Athletics) published on that Berlin final, which timed every 10 metre segment of the race. It is the cleanest data anyone has on the fastest run ever recorded, so it is worth reading properly instead of as a trivia answer.
Where in the race the speed actually shows up
Bolt's first 10 metres took 1.89 seconds, and that includes his reaction to the gun of 0.146. Nobody is near top speed that early. He was still gaining through 50 and 60 metres, peaked in the 60 to 80 window, and then lost a little over the last 20, which every sprinter does. The winner of a 100m is usually the one who slows down least.
He was also rarely the quickest man out of the blocks. He won races in the second half, where his stride length and top speed took over. That matters for what comes next.
What would Bolt run in a 40 yard dash?
He went through 40 metres in 4.64. A 40 yard dash is 36.6 metres, so drawing a straight line between his 30 and 40 metre splits puts him through 40 yards at roughly 4.35 seconds from the gun. A football 40 doesn't wait for a gun, though. The watch starts when the athlete moves, so take away the reaction time and you land somewhere around 4.2. That is our own arithmetic from the published splits. He never ran a timed 40 from a three point stance in that race, and anyone quoting you a precise figure is doing the same maths we just did.
Here's the part we find more interesting than the number. Over 40 yards, the gap between the fastest sprinter in history and an elite football player is a couple of tenths. Over 100 metres it's closer to a full second. The longer the distance, the more top speed counts, and a football field almost never gives anybody the distance.
Why a field athlete should care about the first fifteen yards
Think about what decides a play. A corner breaks on the ball. A midfielder gets to a loose ball first. A linebacker closes on a back who just cut. Almost all of it is over inside ten or fifteen yards, starting from a jog, a shuffle or a stance. That's acceleration, and it's the stretch of the Berlin race where Bolt was least special.
Most high school field athletes have the opposite problem from a 100m sprinter. Their top speed is fine for their sport. What costs them is the first three or four steps: popping up too tall too early, reaching out in front with the foot, or wasting time in the stance itself. We wrote up the stance question in two point vs three point starts, and how we think about splitting a week between starts and top speed in acceleration vs max velocity training.
So does top speed matter at all?
Yes, just less often than the highlight clips suggest. The breakaway, the kick return, the back who gets past the second level and has 60 yards in front of him. Top speed also sets the ceiling that acceleration is climbing toward, so an athlete with more of it has more room to accelerate into. That's why our view is that top speed work gets a small dose every week, never zero. The usual test is a flying 10: build up over a long run-in and time only the last ten yards, which takes the start out of the number completely.
How to read your own numbers against his
The comparison is useful in one direction only. A game GPS reading of 39 km/h on a high school receiver sounds slow next to 44.7. It isn't. As our high school speed benchmarks lay out, that reading converts to a track 100m of roughly 10.8 to 11.2 seconds, and a varsity 40 in the 4.6 to 4.9 range is a strong number at that age.
Bolt is a ceiling. He isn't a target, and he isn't a useful yardstick for a sophomore. The better question is how much of your own 40 is going in the first ten yards, because that is the part most athletes can still move.
If you want to find out where an athlete's time is going, get in touch and we'll set up a first session.