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CHAPTER THREE
MY OWN WORST ENEMY
I arrived in my khaki uniform at Waldensia Primary and friend- ships happened quickly. I had energy and good manners, so I got on with most people, but I really liked the kids who enjoyed cricket and I'd hit it off with anyone who had a bat and a ball. I became friends with a kid called Nugent Walker Junior, because he was as excited as I was by watching the likes of Courtney Walsh and Brian Lara on the TV, and we hung out most days, smashing sixes around the school field. Nugent lived down the way from me and he would be waiting for me outside his house as I walked to school. We became inseparable. Almost straightaway he was nicknamed 'NJ' by friends, which made sense – it came from his initials after all. But after we'd been hanging out for a while, everyone at school called me 'VJ'. I had no idea where it came from, but I really didn't mind the tag because I'd taken to hating my name. Nobody could say it right and I was called 'Oosain', 'Oh-sain' or 'Uh-sain' whenever I met someone for the first time. Some kids referred to me as 'Insane', which gave the impression I was bad
MY OWN WORST ENEMY
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or tough. But it was only when girls started saying my name at high school that I finally got into it. '
Yooo-sain! Yooo-sain!
' they cooed. 'Oh, I see,' I thought when I heard it for the first time. 'Usain sounds kinda nice whenever a girl calls for me from across the street.' At school I was pretty good in class, especially math, and when lessons began I made an important discovery: man, I loved to compete! As soon as a problem went up on the chalk board, I'd race to finish. Often NJ would battle me to see who could complete the sums first, and that's when a killer instinct showed up. Everything I got involved in, I did it to win. I
had
to win. First was everything, second only meant losing. And I really hated losing. I cruised through my first few years at school, and sports quickly became my thing. Thanks to all that running around the wild bush in Coxeath I was fast. In cricket when I bowled I could come down on the wicket hard, with speed, and I was quick in the field. My physical size gave me an advantage over the other pupils because I was a growing into a tall kid, and at the age of eight I was taking wickets off cricketers a lot older than me, guys that were 10 or 11 years old. I was already the same height as them and it wasn't long before I'd opened the batting for Waldensia a couple of years earlier than most kids even made the team. I was pretty good at sprinting, too. I had potential. I was quick on my feet and after I'd beaten Ricardo in the Waldensia sports day, I entered my first serious inter-schools race (where the prize was made out of tin and plastic rather than rice and peas), winning all my events. After a few more competitions in
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