Mickey Rourke is a 69-year-old actor and retired boxer. Usain Bolt is a nine-time Olympic gold medalist. Apparently, early one morning, Rourke actually challenged Bolt to a race.
Bolt told the story in an interview with Complex Sports‘ Russ Bengtson:
“But the only person that was the biggest thing was Mickey Rourke. He challenged me to a race and I thought he was joking he’s like ‘let’s go!’ In the streets at like 3 in the morning, he took his shoes off and everything. Like for 20 meters.”
When asked how much he won by, Bolt replied:
“It was good though, it was good fun.”
At first glance, I assumed that Bolt simply laughed when asked how badly he demolished Rourke because he was being nice. But then, I found a story from July 2012 written by then-Yahoo! Sports reporter Martin Rogers in which Rourke tells this same story, except in this version, Rourke says he won. And Rogers writes that it was a “boozy” race.
“We were outside the Wellington in Central London and it was four in the morning,” Rourke said. “It was just that time of the night, you know, when anything can happen. So I went up to him and I said, ‘Come on, you are the world’s fastest man, let’s go.’”
Rogers noted that Rourke told him he asked for a head start to make it fair. Rourke continued:
“There was a space in the street of about 30 meters,” Rourke said. “I got him to back up about four paces, we set off and I got him by a few inches.”
I’m just going to say that if I raced a guy like Usain Bolt and not many people were there to witness it, I’d claim that I won too. Maybe Rourke did win for real, though. Who can say for sure?
