“I remember in 2016, it was coming up to my last Olympics and my biggest competitor was Justin Gatlin and throughout the year I was struggling with motivation because I had won everything… and I was like going to training and the older you get the harder it gets. I was just tired and everyday was like work and I got injured and it was double the work for me. It was hard to motivate myself everyday,” Bolt told the High Performance podcast.

But Gatlin saying that he would travel around the world with the Olympic medal around his neck motivated Bolt to train harder than he was in order to finish atop the podium at the Rio Olympics.

“I remember watching a video, he (Gatlin) was on a podcast at that time and they said ‘are you going to win? And he said ‘yeah I am going to win’. And they were going to go on a tour around the world with medals and that did it for me. I was like ‘yeah, you are not going to win’. That is how competitive I was. If I probably didn’t see the video, it probably would have been different. But I saw that video and it helped motivate me. You know what ‘I need to get to training and I need to do this’. Because there is no way I am going to allow him to beat me. That is how competitive I am,” Bolt said.

Bolt, now retired, also spoke about the pre-race routine of Gatlin and other sprinters.

“It is always fun, I enjoyed watching Justin because it is fun to see him in his element because he does this thing where he walks back and forth like a crazy person. And he is serious and I always find it so funny and amusing because that is his way of psyching himself up though. It is something that they do but I always knew that if I was prepared there was no way you were going to beat me. There is no way you are going to intimidate me.”

Spitting across the track

Gatlin, the 2004 Athens gold-medal winner, tried to scare Bolt the first time they raced against each other.
“I remember the first time I competed with Justin, he spit across my lane. We were in Zagreb and you know when you warm up and run out of your blocks and I was walking back (in the lane) and he was walking towards me. And he spit across the lane in front of me. And I laughed because I knew what he was trying to do. But it didn’t matter to me because all that matters is when we line up in that lane and the gun goes you better be ready.”