Robert Lee "Bullet Bob" Hayes (December 20, 1942 - September 18, 2002) was an Olympic sprinter turned American football wide receiver in the National Football League for the Dallas Cowboys. An American track and field athlete, he was a two-sport stand-out in college in both track and football at Florida A&M University. He has one of the top 100 meter times by NFL players. Hayes was enshrined in the Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor in 2001 and was selected for induction in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in January 2009.

At the 1964 Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, Hayes had his finest hour as a sprinter. First, he won the 100m and in doing so tied the then world record in the 100 m with a time of 10.06 seconds, even though he was running in lane 1 which had, the day before, been used for the 20 km racewalk and this badly chewed up the cinder track. He also was running in borrowed spikes because one of his shoes had been kicked under the bed when he was playing with some friends and he didn't realize until he got there. This was followed by a second gold medal in the 4x100 meter relay, which also produced a new World Record (39.06 seconds).  His come-from-behind win for the US team in the relay was one of the most memorable Olympic moments. Hand-timed between 8.5 and 8.9 seconds, his relay leg is the fastest in history. Jocelyn Delecour, France's anchor leg runner, famously said to Paul Drayton before the relay final that, "You can't win, all you have is Bob Hayes." Drayton was able to reply afterwards, "That's all we need." The race was also Hayes' last as a track and field athlete, as he permanently switched to football after it, aged only 21.  In some of the first meets to be timed with experimental fully automatic timing, Hayes was the first man to break ten seconds for the 100 meters, albeit with a 5.3 m/s wind assistance in the semi-finals of the 1964 Olympics. His time was recorded at 9.91 seconds. Jim Hines officially broke 10 seconds at the high altitude of Mexico City, Mexico in 1968 (and on a synthetic track) with a wind legal 9.95 which stood as the world record for almost 15 years. The next to surpass Hayes at a low altitude Olympics was Carl Lewis in 1984 when he won in 9.99, some 20 years later (though Hasely Crawford equaled the time in 1976).  Until the Tokyo Olympics, world records were measured by officials with stopwatches, measured to the nearest tenth of a second. Although fully automatic timing was used in Tokyo, the times were given the appearance of manual timing. This was done by subtracting 0.05 seconds from the automatic time and rounding to the nearest tenth of a second, making Hayes' time of 10.06 seconds convert to 10.0 seconds, despite the fact that the officials with stopwatches had measured Hayes' time to be 9.9 seconds, and the average difference between manual and automatic times was typically 0.15 to 0.20 seconds. This unique method of determining the official time therefore denied Hayes the record of being the first to officially record 9.9 seconds for the 100 meters. The first official times of 9.9 seconds were recorded at the "Night of Speed" in 1968.

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