Usain Bolt is considered the greatest sprinter in history, but has revealed how close he came to never running what became his pet event at the Olympics — the 100-metre sprint. Bolt still holds world records in the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m events, with his mark of 9.58 seconds for the 100-metre sprint set back in 2009. He holds the three fastest times ever recorded for a 100m sprint. The Jamaican initially began as a 200m sprinter when his coach Glen Mills urged him to run the 400m, which he believed would aid Bolt's performance in the 200m events. Bolt was more interested in the 100m sprint instead and placed a bet with Mills in 2007, a year before his Olympic debut, and the rest is history. "After the World Championships in Osaka, we were talking about what we needed to do and he says, 'You need to get in the gym and you also need to run another event', and he wanted me to do the 400 metres," he said on the Ready Set Go podcast. "I was like, 'Alright, let's make a bet. Let me run one 100 metres. If I run fast, I run the 100 metres, if I run slow, I run the 400 metres'. He thought I was going to run slow. "I'll never forget, me and Wallace [Spearmon] were in that race, it was in Greece, and I was like, 'I just want to get to 10.1, if I can get to 10.1 I think that's quick enough', and he was like, 'If you run 10.1 that's excellent'. "When I ran and I ran 10.03, I was like, 'You can't say no', because then it was 9.8 and 9.7, everybody was running a regular 9.9, it wasn't consistently 9.8s [or] 9.7s. "That's how I got into it. If I had run like 10.2 I would be running the 400 metres." Bolt appeared on the podcast alongside long-time US rival Justin Gatlin and Bahamian sprinter Rodney Green, and both were left stunned by the Jamaican's revelation. "That one moment in time when the gun went off, if you had run a 10.22 we would have been seeing a 400 metre Bolt instead of a 100 metre Bolt," Gatlin said. "He would have never run the 100 again after that." "I would have been good [at the 400 metres] too, but I hate the training," Bolt responded. "You would have never seen me in the 100 metres, it would just be two and four, just like Michael Johnson. No matter how fast I was running, my coach always was saying maybe I should change." The next year, after winning his bet with Mills, Bolt announced himself as the headline act in athletics with the first of eight Olympic gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Bolt eventually retired having won the gold medal in the 100m and 200m events in three consecutive Olympic Games.