speed strikes fear into the heart of every defender. The Frenchman is outrageously quick, capable of leaving nearly every player on the planet in his dust. But how rapid is he compared to Usain Bolt - the fastest human in history? A study from October 2022 found that Mbappe was the world’s fastest player, , which equates to roughly around 22.4mph. Despite his status as one of the fastest men in football, he remains some way behind the extraordinary Bolt. Per the Olympic website, at the 2009 IAAF World Championships. That works out at around 29.65mph. With there being a significant gulf between Bolt and Mbappe's top speeds, how big would the gap look between the two in a 100m race? A fascinating 3D simulation has been uploaded to
YouTube by Speed Showdown - the same YouTube creator who also showed us how ridiculous it would look if Bolt raced an average human over 100m. Mbappe is obviously far from your average human. While he still finishes some way behind the Jamaican icon in the simulation, he's not a million miles behind him. : As you can see, the forward gets off to a good start, but it doesn’t take long before Bolt, who set the current 100m world record with a lightning-quick time of 9.58 seconds in
Berlin in 2009, begins to motor away. In a short space of time, he opens up an increasingly large gap on the footballer, reaching a much higher top speed and crossing the line with his record-breaking time shown on the clock. However, Mbappe is not that far behind, coming through to finish in (a still impressive) 10.9 seconds. Not bad, but *much* slower in 100m terms when compared to Bolt and other racers. If Mbappe had raced in the 100m final at the Tokyo Olympics, he would have finished just over a second behind bronze medalist Andre De Grasse. It only goes to show how impressive Bolt was at his best. And with , credit has to be given to the
Football superstar's speed for making it look remotely competitive on the simulation. Usain Bolt's Top Five 100m Times 16/08/2009 Berlin 9.58 05/08/2012
London 9.63 16/08/2008
Beijing 9.69 31/05/2008
New York 9.72 03/05/2008 Kingston 9.76 Surprisingly, Mbappe wasn't among when the list was updated in February. Real Madrid's German defender Antonio Rudiger boasts the quickest sprint clocked in a football match in that time frame (36.7km/h), although Mbappe is still arguably the fastest player in the world. The Frenchman's lightning-quick runs behind defences are terrifying for opposing sides and very few defenders, if any, can keep pace with the majestic Frenchman when he's in full flow. in an encounter against his former club Monaco in 2019, according to the Daily Mail. The forward also clocked a time of 10.9 seconds over 100m in a
Champions League outing for
Paris Saint-Germain against Real Sociedad in March 2024. This is still over one second slower than the Jamaican's World Record time. However, given how Bolt's football career went having , both men should probably stick to their own sports.