Athletics · 1996 · Atlanta, USA
19.32, in Golden Shoes
An American sprinter takes both the 200m and the 400m at one Olympics, in his own country, and cuts 0.34 seconds off his own 200m world record in custom gold spikes.
19.32s (world record)
200m time
43.49s (Olympic record)
400m time
First 200m/400m Olympic double
Feat
Michael Johnson went into the Atlanta Games as reigning world champion over both 200m and 400m, and the favourite to become the first man to win both events at a single Olympics. He had a pair of gold Nike spikes made for the occasion, a small piece of theatre that has been inseparable from the result ever since.
He took the 400m comfortably in an Olympic record 43.49 seconds. The 200m final on 1 August was the one that defined the Games: 19.32 seconds, taking 0.34 off the world record of 19.66 he had set himself three months earlier, which is not a jump elite sprinting normally produces. Purists had spent years calling his bolt-upright, short-striding action unorthodox. It held the world record for twelve years.
Nobody had completed that double at a single Olympics before him, and few have managed it since. Between the record, the shoes and the home crowd, Atlanta put Johnson alongside Carl Lewis among the American track stars of his generation.
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