Usain Bolt shares strange advice that fueled his highly successful career and Noah Lyles agrees with it

Olympic legend Usain Bolt.

Usain Bolt shares strange advice that fueled his highly successful career and Noah Lyles agrees with it

Joel Omotto 06:55 - 25.11.2024

Jamaican spring great Usain Bolt has shared some strange advice that his coach Glen Mills gave him early in his career which later turned out to serve him well.

Jamaica sprint legend Usain Bolt has opened up on the advice that he received from his legendary coach Glen Mills which fueled his highly successful track career.

Bolt is regarded as the greatest sprinter of all time after his eight Olympics and 10 world titles as well as world records in both 100m and 200m.

However, he admits none of those would have happened had he not been told to use defeats as fuel to drive his ambitions rather than let it weigh him down.

“When we started working together, he [Mills] said something to me,” Bolt said as per the Mirror.

“He said, 'When you figure this out, you will get better... you have to learn how to lose before you can learn how to win.' And it took me two years to figure out exactly what he meant by that, and that was one of the biggest things that confused me. I was like, 'Why would I want to learn how to lose?'

“You have to understand that you will fail. But when you do fail, what do you learn from the failure? And that's pretty much what he meant. So, when I was losing (I asked myself), 'How do I get better? What do I need to do to get better? I started to understand that, when I lose... I'm closer to starting to win.”

Given his storied career, it is hard to imagine that Bolt endured failure but that is exactly what happened at the formative years of his career, starting with elimination in the 200m heats at the 2004 Athens Olympics followed by eighth place over the distance at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki before he managed silver at the 2007 edition in Osaka, Japan.

It is after those heartbreaking results that Bolt then became a global icon, winning gold in both 100m and 200m at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in world record times, before he lowered his own marks to 9.58 second in 100m and 19.19 in 200m at the 2009 World Championships, records that are yet to be broken to date.

Bolt would dominate his spot with more medals at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics as well as 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 World Championships after which he retired.

Bolt’s sentiments are perhaps shared by American spring king Noah Lyles who also admitted that losing at the Tokyo Olympics, where he managed bronze in 200m, fueled his desire to get it right next time and he went one better by claiming both 100m and 200m at the 2023 World Championships.

“From that moment, I resolved never to repeat that experience. I committed to handling things correctly and practicing diligently over the years. It has all led to this point. You only need one victory, and as long as it’s the last one, that’s all that matters,” said Lyles, who would win his first Olympics gold at the 2024 Paris Games after edging his rivals in 100m.