"Leroy Russel Burrell" is an United States/American former track and field athlete, who twice set the men's 100 metres world record progression/world record for the 100 metres/100 m Sprint (running)/sprint, setting a time of 9.90 seconds in June 1991. This was broken by Carl Lewis in September at the World Track and Field Championships. In that race, Burrell came in second, yet he beat his own record. Burrell set the record for a second time when he ran 9.85 sec in July 1994, a record that stood until the 1996 Summer Olympics/1996 Olympics in Atlanta, when Donovan Bailey ran 9.84 ssec.

Burrell grew up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and attended Penn Wood High School, where he single-handedly won the state championship by winning the 100 m, 200 metres/200 m, long jump, and triple jump. Suffering from poor eyesight accentuated by a childhood eye injury, he was poor at other sports, but excelled on the track from an early age.

More Leroy Burrell on Wikipedia.

We never would have thought that when we were kids we would be here, ... We just thought that we would think about it for a little while and dream about it. But dreams do come true.

171

You've got a lot of guys who can run 10.2, who can run 20.5 (in the 200), and we take that for granted. What we don't have are the guys in college who can run sub-10 (seconds) or the numbers that we may have had in the 1980s or early 1990s.

116