Kevin Quealy and Graham Roberts looks at how historically impressive Usain Bolt was in winning the 100m in 9.63 seconds:

Based on the athletes’ average speeds, if every Olympic medalist raced each other, Usain Bolt (the London version) would win, with a wide distribution of Olympians behind him.

Check out the awesome data visualizations used to compare runners dating back to the 1896 Athens games.

tl;dr: Usain Bolt is damn fast.

(via: Oliver Reichsten)