Usain Bolt doesn’t feel he has to alter his lifestyle after a car crash in Jamaica forced him to examine whether he needed to make any changes.
The three-time Olympic gold medalist crashed his BMW into a ditch along a highway last month and required minor surgery on his left foot after stepping onto thorns while getting out of the wreckage.
The accident has been linked to criticism of Bolt’s lifestyle since he set world records in the 100m and 200m events at the Beijing Olympics and was part of the Jamaican team that broke the world mark in the 400m relay.
PHOTO: REUTERS
But Bolt, who admitted to trying marijuana in his youth and apologized for suggesting all young Jamaicans know how to roll a joint earlier this year, denied he needed to change anything.
“I don’t know what they mean by [the crash being a] wake-up call because I go to training and I do what I have to do,” Bolt said on Friday. “People can say anything they want to say, that is their opinion. I guess people take things out of context a lot and I just have to watch what I say, but I try not to change my lifestyle because I am not going to let anyone change me.”
“People come under pressure from the media, they go all crazy,” he said. “I am not going to let them happen to me. I am going to be myself. I am not going to change. I don’t go out a lot, I stay home.”
The 22-year-old Bolt, who has had the stitches removed and returns to action today in a 150m street race in Manchester, acknowledged that the crash caused him to analyze his lifestyle.
“I was just frightened. I was not thinking about my career and then, when it calmed down, I started thinking about what could have happened and everything else,” Bolt said. “Definitely, after something like that, you look at life through and over, and look at what has gone wrong — where you should improve or should be careful.”
Despite his coach urging him to pullout of the Manchester event, Bolt has come to see his favorite soccer team, Manchester United, and break Donovan Bailey’s 12-year-old mark of 14.99 seconds in the rarely run 150.
“I ran 14-something, but I have run it only in training. I don’t go worrying about times. That is when you start running slower,” said Bolt, who planned to be at Old Trafford yesterday for United’s match against Arsenal.
“After the accident, [my coach] was having second thoughts about sending me,” Bolt said. “But I wanted to come here.”
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