Olympics
At the 1964 Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, Hayes had his finest hour as a sprinter. First, he won the 100m and broke the then world record in the 100 m with a time of 10.06 seconds, even though he was running in lane 1 which had, the day before, been used for the 20 km racewalk and this badly chewed up the cinder track. He also was running in borrowed spikes because one of his shoes had been kicked under the bed when he was playing with some friends and he didn't realize until he got there. This was followed by a second gold medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay, which also produced a new World Record (39.06 seconds).
His come-from-behind win for the US team in the relay was one of the most memorable Olympic moments. Jocelyn Delecour, France's anchor leg runner, famously said to Paul Drayton before the relay final that, "You can't win, all you have is Bob Hayes." Drayton was able to reply afterwards, "All you need..." The race was also Hayes' last as a track and field athlete, as he permanently switched to football after it.
In some of the first meets to be timed with experimental fully automatic timing, Hayes was the first man to break ten seconds for the 100 metres, albeit with a 5.3 m/s wind assistance in the semi-finals of the 1964 Olympics. His time was recorded at 9.91 seconds. Jim Hines officially broke 10 seconds at altitude in 1968 with a wind legal 9.95 which stood as the world record for almost 15 years. Aside from Ben Johnson, who ran 9.79 in the 1988 Olympic final only to be banned from the sport for using performance enhancing drugs, the next to surpass Hayes at the Olympics was the 3 medalists in 1996, led by Donovan Bailey doing 9.84, 32 years later.
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