Athletics · 1996 · Atlanta, USA
19.32, in Golden Shoes
An American sprinter completes an unprecedented 200m and 400m Olympic double in his home country, tearing 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 entered the Atlanta Games as the reigning world champion at both 200m and 400m and the favourite to become the first man to win both events at a single Olympics. He wore specially made gold Nike spikes for the occasion, a small piece of theatre that became inseparable from what followed.
He won the 400m comfortably in an Olympic record 43.49 seconds, but it was the 200m final on 1 August that defined the Games. Johnson ran 19.32 seconds, obliterating his own three-month-old world record of 19.66 by an enormous 0.34 seconds, a jump in class rarely seen at the elite end of sprinting. His distinctive bolt-upright, short-striding style had, for years, been dismissed by purists as unorthodox; in Atlanta it produced a time that stood as the world record for twelve years.
The double had never been achieved at a single Olympics before Johnson and has been matched only rarely since. Combined with the record and the gold shoes, the performance made Johnson, alongside Carl Lewis before him, one of the defining American track stars of his generation.
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