Story of The Malaysian 100 Meters Sprint Record

Published by simon on November 3, 2009

With all the interested in the 100m world record held by Usain Bolt (9.58s) recently, does anyone know what the Malaysian record is and who holds it? Anyone? Without googling it?

Before we get to that, let me tell you what the record was back when i was a kid in the 80′s. Back then everyone in school knew the record was held by the legendary Dr. M. Jegathesan (now Datuk). I can’t remember his time, but he still holds the 200m record until today, set 41 years ago in the Mexico Olympics back in ’68. Back when i was a kid, the older generation and my teachers spoke of ‘The Flying Doctor’ in legendary terms, he was the first Malaysian to reach 2 semifinals in an Olympic event.

During the years when i was in school, the fastest Malaysian was this guy called Abdul Rahman Koyakutty. I can’t really remember much about him (except that he had an extravagant pre-race ritual while on the starting line). But you have to remember during the mid-80′s we had lots of sporting greats like Nordin Jadi, M. Kumaresan, Josephine Mary, G. Shanti, Nurul Huda Abdullah, Rabuan Pit and M. Ramachandran. Of course these were the days before weekly live EPL games on Astro, so all we had was RTM2.

Some 12 years ago in the late 90′s talk of Dr. Jega’s record in danger of being broken resurfaced when two young sprinters emerged, Watson Nyambek and Azmi Ibrahim. I wasn’t really following athletics by then, but one of them obviously did better than the other who sort of fizzled out despite the hype.

And so coming back to the earlier question, what’s the current national record? It’s 10.30s held by Watson Nyambek. Yep, the Flying Dayak did manage to break the record. It’s nice to know Malaysian men can still run faster than American women… (Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record is 10.49s) but of course being Asians we’re disadvantaged genetically when it comes to running.

Will we see the record broken again soon? Who knows.

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