"Some people were even cussing" - When Usain Bolt nearly quit after being booed by Jamaicans at home stadium

Usain Bolt once revealed that he was heavily booed and thrown cusses at during a race at the Kingston National Stadium in Jamaica. The Jamaican had pulled his hamstring in the race and said he was accused of stopping deliberately.

Bolt rose to prominence at the 2002 World Junior Championships in front of his home crowd in Kingston when he became the youngest to win the 200m title. However, the sprinter was so nervous before the race that he was shaking and had put his shoes on the wrong feet.

The Jamaican continued his rise before injuries started derailing his career, including his Olympic debut in 2004 and at the 2005 World Championships. Then came a 4x400m relay race in Kingston the following year when he contemplated quitting track and field.

“It was a 4x400 race. I have never forgotten it. It was in ’06,” Bolt shared on The Powells in 2022 (via Pulse Sports). “I came and ran, and I kind of pushed, but my body was not allowing it. Running down the straight, I was booed. A lot of people do not know that.”

Bolt had pulled up his hamstring and when he stopped, people accused him of deliberately stopping because he couldn't win the race.

"Some people were even shouting, cussing, saying that I'd stopped on purpose because I knew I wasn't going to win. They jeered me for limping away...What the hell is this?' I thought, feeling sick - seriously sick. 'Where did this come from?' My world crashed in; I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Usain Bolt wrote in his autobiography, Faster Than Lightning.

The eight-time Olympic champion was only 19 at the time and had yet to win an Olympic medal or break a senior world record. Seeing the fans go wild at him had him questioning his career.

"Is this really working?" he wrote. "Should I really continue? All these things that I do, no matter how hard I try, this might not be for me. This track and field thing is tough."

However, Bolt rose through the setback, and two years later, he created history at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He won the 100m, 200m and 4x100m titles (it was stripped later) while breaking the world records in both of the sprint events. He improved both of the records at the following year's World Championships, and they are still standing a decade and a half later.

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Usain Bolt reveals how he navigated Jamaican fans behavior

Usain Bolt strikes an iconic pose at Laureus World Sports Awards Madrid 2024 - Source: Getty

Speaking during an appearance on the High-Performance Podcast in 2024, Usain Bolt revealed that with time, he understood that Jamaican fans only love their athletes when they are winning. Therefore, he decided to focus on his own running rather than putting the nation first.

“I kind of figured out that ‘If I do well, they are going to love me. If I don’t do so well, they won’t love me so much,’” Bolt explained on The Powells (via Pulse Sports). “That is when I figured out that I had to do this for myself first.”

“You have to learn to push past the noise,” Usain Bolt added. “At the end of the day, you’re running for yourself.”

The Jamaican is by far the greatest sprinter in history and has eight Olympic and 11 world titles to his name. But his biggest achievement, in addition to the world records, was perhaps his three consecutive 100m-200m doubles at the Olympics between 2008 and 2016. No other sprinter has been able to do it twice, and the last one to win both titles in a single edition other than Bolt was Carl Lewis in 1984.