Jim Hines became the first man to run 100 metres in under 10 seconds with fully automatic timing.
Hines clocked 9.95 seconds in the Olympic final at Mexico City on 14 October 1968. The performance made him the first officially recognized electronic sub-10-second sprinter and earned him the Olympic title. His time also became the first world record recorded with fully automatic timing.
Earlier athletes had recorded times below 10 seconds using hand timing, but hand-timed marks were reported to a tenth of a second and were not directly equivalent to modern automatic results. Hines’s 9.95 therefore marked an important technological as well as athletic milestone.
The high altitude of Mexico City, about 2,240 metres above sea level, helped sprint performances by reducing air resistance. Hines’s mark remained the Olympic record until 1988.