Jim Hines: The Man Who Broke Ten Seconds
On the evening of 20 June 1968, at Hughes Stadium in Sacramento, three men ran the 100 metres in a hand-timed 9.9 seconds. Track historians have called it the Night of Speed. One of the three, a Texas Southern student from Oakland named Jim Hines, had crossed the barrier that had defined sprinting for a generation. Four months later, in Mexico City, he did it again with electronic clocks running — 9.95 — and that number stayed on the books for fifteen years, longer than any men's 100 metres world record of the fully automatic era.
Oakland, and a Coach's Eye
Hines was born on 10 September 1946 in Dumas, Arkansas, and raised in Oakland, California, graduating from McClymonds High School in 1964. He was not, initially, a runner. He played baseball. The switch came because a track coach named Jim Coleman watched him move and identified what he was actually built for.
That detail is worth pausing on. Elite sprinting is unusually dependent on being found. There is no junior sprinting culture that catches everyone; a great many people with the requisite fibre composition and limb mechanics simply never get put on a track. Hines was seen. He went on to Texas Southern University in Houston, running for the Tigers.
The Night of Speed
The US national championships at Sacramento on 20 June 1968 produced the most concentrated cluster of fast times the event had ever seen. Hines became the first man to break the ten-second barrier in the 100 metres, running 9.9 on manual timing — with an electronic reading of 10.03. Ronnie Ray Smith and Charles Greene recorded 9.9 hand times the same evening.
The split between those two numbers, 9.9 and 10.03, is the technical drama of Hines's entire career. Hand timing starts when a human sees the gun's smoke and stops when a human sees the torso cross the line; it flatters the athlete by roughly the length of a reaction. Electronic timing does not. The sport was in the middle of switching, and Hines happened to be the fastest man alive at exactly the moment the truth about how fast anyone actually was became measurable.
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At the 1968 Olympics he settled it. Hines won the 100 metres in an electronically timed 9.95 — initially displayed as 9.89 before photographic correction — with a hand time of 9.9. It became the official world record as the fastest electronic time yet recorded, making him, in World Athletics' formulation, the first man officially to break ten seconds with electronic timing. The final produced the third all-Black podium in Olympic history.
He then anchored the United States 4x100 metres relay to gold in a world record 38.24. Two golds, two world records, one Games.
His 100 metres record stood until Calvin Smith ran 9.93 in 1983 — fifteen years, the longest reign of any men's 100 metres world record in the fully automatic era. To put that in perspective: the mark set by a twenty-two-year-old in 1968 survived the entire careers of nearly every sprinter who followed him in the 1970s.
The NFL Detour
Hines retired from competitive athletics in 1968, at the very top, and took the offer that fast men of the era were routinely given: professional football. The Miami Dolphins drafted him in the sixth round of the 1968 NFL/AFL draft. He spent 1968 on the practice squad, where teammates gave him the nickname "Oops." In 1969 he appeared in ten games for Miami, accumulating 52 all-purpose yards. His final professional appearance came with the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970.
The nickname tells the story efficiently. Pure straight-line speed does not transfer to catching a football in traffic, and the experiment — tried repeatedly across NFL history — rarely works. Hines was the fastest man on the planet and a marginal wide receiver.
After
He worked on oil rigs, played semi-professional football for the Austin Texans in 1977, and competed in Masters competition at UCLA in 1984. More lastingly, he spent years working with inner-city youth in Houston. He was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Texas Track and Field Coaches Hall of Fame in 2016.
Jim Hines died on 3 June 2023 in Hayward, California, at seventy-six.
Why Jim Is Called a Genius
Any claim of genius for Hines rests on physical craft, not on intellect, and the distinction has to be made explicitly. He produced no ideas, no method, no body of work in the sense that word usually implies. He ran one hundred metres faster than anyone had before, and the entire case is contained in about ten seconds of his life.
What the craft actually consisted of is worth stating precisely, because "he was fast" undersells it. The 100 metres is a sequence of distinct technical problems solved in order under enormous time pressure: reacting to a gun without anticipating it; driving out of the blocks at a shallow angle with the torso still down; transitioning through roughly thirty metres from a pushing action to a cyclical one without losing rhythm; hitting maximum velocity; and then, hardest of all, decelerating more slowly than everyone else, because nobody actually maintains top speed to the tape. Hines's particular strength lay in reaching and holding a very high terminal velocity — the phase that decides races against fields where every start is already excellent. Executing that whole chain twice in one year, in a championship final, at the exact moment the sport was switching to unforgiving electronic timing, is the achievement.
The honest counter-case is straightforward. Sprinting talent is substantially inherited; Hines chose neither his fibre type nor his limb proportions. Two other men ran 9.9 on the same night, which suggests conditions and an era as well as a man. The Mexico City Games were staged at high altitude, a circumstance that has always attended discussion of the 1968 sprint marks. And the record fell, as records do. Nothing here is the invention of a technique or the founding of a school. It is the highest expression of a physical craft, performed at the precise historical hinge where the sport learned to measure itself honestly — which is why the name attached to the barrier is his.
Legacy
Hines occupies a permanent position that no later sprinter can take from him: the sub-ten-second 100 metres, now routine enough that dozens of men achieve it every season, was first done by him. His 38.24 relay record and his fifteen-year individual reign belong to the record books, but the barrier belongs to history. Every time a sprinter's time flashes up beginning with a nine, it is an echo of a summer evening in Sacramento in 1968.
