Daily Times

LONDON: The fastest man on the planet, Usain Bolt has opened up about his personal life in a recent interview he gave to The Telegraph.

The sprinter told about what was in his mind when he ran his first race. He said, “I was thinking about winning.” But the most important thing that Bolt recalls from his childhood is that he had no interest in running. He used to love playing football and cricket and has revealed that his hero was Pakistan’s bowling great Waqar Younis.

In what comes as a shocking confession, the sprinter has said that he was never interested in sprinting and instead he used to love watching cricket and football during his childhood days. The 30-year old has also expressed that he had never imagined that he would turn out to be a sprinter.

There have also been incidents where the sprinter has jokingly talked about joining Manchester United as a football player. He has also been seen playing cricket alongside his Jamaica teammates in the domestic cricket level in the Carribean. The triple-triple winner was also seen playing the gentlemen’s game with Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh as part of his stunt for sportswear brand Puma.

The sprinter had grown up in the village of Sherwood Content in Jamaica where he used to study at the Waldensia Primary School. He had first taken to the track in that school where the track was not a proper one, it was a part of the field which had been marked by black lines serving as lanes. Bolt recalls, “Yeah, that’s where it all started for me. That’s where we had our sports day, and it was really small.”

The sprinter said, “I was so in love with cricket I didn’t want to do anything else. Track was just something I was doing because I was good at it, and because I was winning it was, “You should do this.”’ He shrugs. ‘So, all right…” Lorna Thorpe was the head of sport at the William Knibb Memorial High School in the town of Falmouth where all the primary schools would gather in Trelawny. Thorpe told The Telegraph, “You could see this tall young boy – just raw natural talent. The principal at the time decided to give him a scholarship because we didn’t want to lose him.”