Jim Hines spent that day doing the unglamorous part first. Heats. Then a quarterfinal, then a semi, same as everybody else in Mexico City, and you're burning matches you'd rather save. Nobody hands you the final. You run your way into it, and then you line up again with legs that already did the work twice.
People had been arguing about ten flat for about a decade by then. Was it a wall, was it just a round number we liked the look of, could a human body get under it. Hand timers had already flirted with it — that summer in Sacramento the watches read 9.9 and the arguing only got louder, because a thumb on a stopwatch is a thumb on a stopwatch. The clock that settled it in 1968 was electric. 9.95. Ten years of debate closed out in under ten seconds, which is a funny ratio when you sit with it.
And that record stood 15 years. Fifteen! Behind him, Lennox Miller took silver for Jamaica and Charlie Greene the bronze, and I think about Miller some — he ran a race nobody would have called anything but excellent on any other afternoon, and he ran it two lanes from the one line everyone would remember. He went home with a medal and a story about standing that close. Hines got relay gold out of those same Games too, which is a lot of running for one week.
Nine ninety-five — that's barely longer than the count-in and first eight bars of a soul 45. Fifteen years holding one number, though, Toby; most songs from 1968 don't get held that long, and the ones that do, somebody's always covering them.
Mexico City sits at roughly 2,240 m, so there's about a quarter less air to shove out of the way — lovely for 100 m, brutal for anything past 1,500. The distance runners came off that track looking like they'd been at altitude for a fortnight, which some of them had, on purpose.