Jim Hines, who has died aged 76, was the first man to run 100 metres in less than 10 seconds, but he had to do it twice to claim his world record that stood for nearly 15 years.
Hines cracked the 10-second mark for the first time at the US outdoor championships in Sacramento, in June 1968, in a race dubbed “The Night of Speed”. His hand-timed 9.9 seconds was equalled by the second- and third-place finishers, Charles Greene and Ronnie Ray Smith, who became joint record-breakers, although electronic timing had all three men clocked at just over 10 seconds.
Four months later, at altitude in Mexico City, Hines faced an evenly matched field, including Jamaica’s Lennox Miller, Canada’s Harry Jerome and the former record-equalling Roger Bambuck of France. But he projected a relaxed confidence, telling them, as relayed by the US sprinter Mel Pender, who was also on the starting line, “I’m ready, baby”.
Slightly behind Pender at the start, Hines blasted past him and his other teammate, Greene, to win the race in 9.9, but electronically timed at 9.95. Hines also anchored the 4x100 relay team, with Pender, Greene and Ronnie Ray Smith beating the favoured Jamaicans, who had set world records twice in the heats. Their winning time of 38.24 seconds broke Jamaica’s newest mark.
Mexico City was a scene of protest, but Hines remained quiet about his teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose clenched fist salutes on the 200m podium became iconic images of the black power movement. Years later Hines explained he felt “the best way a black athlete could make a statement was by going and doing his best … [Tommie and John] didn’t think it out.” As it happened, the 100m medal ceremony, with Hines, Miller and Greene, was the first all-black podium in Olympic history.
It wasn’t until 1977 that international athletics began recognising only electronic timings, and thus the progression of world records changed. Bob Hayes’s 10-second-flat mark from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics became 10.06. Hines’s 9.9 from the 1968 US outdoors became 10.03, and Greene’s Olympic semifinal win at 10.02 became retrospectively a briefly held solo record. Hines’s 9.95 would last until 1983, when Calvin Smith ran 9.93, also in altitude at the US Olympic festival in Colorado Springs. Usain Bolt, whose 9.58 100m record was set in August 2009, has another year to go to break Hines’s nearly 15-year-reign as fastest man in the world.
Hines never got a chance to better his record. Immediately after the Olympics he signed to play American football with the Miami Dolphins, who had chosen him late in the 1968 college draft looking for another Hayes, who had gone from Tokyo gold to star with the Dallas Cowboys. But as Hayes’s college coach pointed out, he “was a football player who sprints”, while Hines had not played football since high school. He joined the Dolphins late in the season, and while reacclimatising to the game earned the nickname “Oops” for his dropped passes. In 1969 he appeared in nine games, running the ball once for seven yards, catching two passes for 23 yards and returning one kickoff for 22. The Dolphins traded him to the Kansas City Chiefs, who cut him after one game in 1970.
Hines displayed his athletic talent early. Born in Dumas, Arkansas, he was the son of Charlie, a construction worker, and Minnie (nee West), who worked in a cannery after the family moved to Oakland, California, when Jim was six. At McClymonds high school, with its rich athletics tradition (the future basketball star Bill Russell had been a champion high jumper), coach Jim Coleman plucked Hines off the baseball field. By 17, he ranked among the US top 20 sprinters, and won a scholarship to the Texas Southern University in Houston, where he ran in the summers for the Houston Striders AAU club, coached by Bobby Morrow, the sprint triple crown (100m, 200m, relay) winner at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. In 1966 Hines won the US national 200m championship; the next year he won the 100m, equalling Hayes’s 10.0 world record and 9.1 record at 100 yards, and placed second to Smith in the 200.
He had married his college sweetheart, Joyce Loving, while at TSU, and after he returned to Houston following the Olympics, their home was robbed of its television, her jewellery and his two gold medals. An appeal in the local paper led to the two medals being mailed back to him anonymously.
After football, he ran on the short-lived professional athletics circuit, and worked on oil rigs. When his marriage broke up, he returned to the Oakland area and became a social worker, setting up a charity to help disadvantaged youth.
Joyce died in 2010. Hines is survived by his son, James Jr, and daughter, Kimberley, four grandchildren and two sisters, Mamie and Camille.
• Jim (James Ray) Hines, athlete, born 10 September 1946; died 3 June 2023
