Running: Built for Record Speed

How fast can a human body run? How high can a man jump? In this series we discover the possibilities of the human body as we dissect and analyze the perfect bodies and ingenious performances of the world’s top athletes using state-of-theart special-effects technologies. In this episode we look at the men’s 100 meters, a race to determine the fastest man on earth. Our focus is Asafa Powell, a Jamaican sprinter who set a world-record time of 9.74 seconds after just four years of training. His biggest weapon is explosive off-the-line acceleration. We fi lm Powell sprinting using four high-speed cameras and analyze his body to discover the eason for his astonishing acceleration. We also go to his homeland to learn more about how he became the world’s fastest man.