American pop star Britney Spears previously claimed she had broken Usain Bolt’s world record for the 100-metre sprint by almost four seconds.
Jamaican runner, Bolt, smashed the record back in 2009 after completing a 100-metres in 9.58 seconds at the Berlin World Athletics Championships.
Bolt holds the world record for the 100m, 200m, and the 4 x 100m relay and won 9 gold medals throughout his three appearances at the Olympics, winning every final he ever took part it.
However, in 2017 Bolt was stripped of one of his gold medals in the relay, due to one of his teammates testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
Bolt had another one of his achievements taken away from in 2020, after ‘Toxic’ singer Britney Spears took to Instagram to reveal she had smashed the men’s 100m world record with a stunning time of 5.97 seconds.
The American’s post on Instagram was captioned:
“Ran my first 5!!!! Getting over your fear of pushing it in the beginning is key… Once I did that I hit 5!!!!! Usually I run 6 or 7… My first try was 9 …. and now I did it whoop !!!!! 100 meter dash,” with a winking face.
Fans took to social media to joke about Spears’ lie, and a simulation showed just how fast the artist would have had to run for her time to have been accurate.
Usain Bolt performing his iconic celebration- Getty
To this day, Usain Bolt is still yet to respond to the singer, which isn’t too surprising when you consider how obviously fake Spears’ claim was.
Due to the sheer impossibility of Spears’ apparent record breaking sprint, she later addressed the incident and claimed she intended the original post as a joke.
“PS …. obviously I was joking about running the 100 meter dash in 5.97 seconds …. the world record is held by Usain Bolt which is 9.58 seconds,” she captioned a following Instagram post.
She added, “But you better believe I’m coming for the world record.”