What is the men's 100m Olympic record time?

The men's 100-metre Olympic record is 9.63 seconds, set by Jamaica's Usain Bolt at the 2012 London Games.

Bolt won the final on 5 August 2012, lowering the Olympic record he had established in Beijing four years earlier with a 9.69-second run. His London time was not a world record—the world mark was, and remains, 9.58 seconds, which Bolt ran at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

That distinction causes one of the most frequent quiz errors: the fastest 100 metres ever run is not the same as the fastest time recorded in Olympic competition. Olympic records apply only to performances at the Games, while world records can be set at other officially sanctioned meets.

The 100 metres has been on the men's Olympic athletics programme since 1896. Bolt's 9.63 was run under legal wind conditions and remains faster than other well-known Olympic performances such as Carl Lewis's 9.92 in 1988 and Bolt's own 9.69 in 2008.