Congrats to Jonathan Law this week who got the main connection. Click continue for the full solution.
Earlier we posed the latest RB Quiz question namely:
What links a superhero dog to the following: A strangely-pronounced General. A bi-polar author. A private beetle. A dubious butler. And an Oxford detective?
And for a bonus bun, why have “The Town of Baldwin” and a country singer called Larry been omitted from the above list?
And the answer is… sprinters! Specifically, the solutions are the surnames of the six most recent legitimate world record holders for the men’s 100 metres: Bolt, Powell, Greene, Bailey, Burrell and Lewis.
Usain Bolt is the current holder (9.58 seconds in August 2009). Bolt is the eponymous superhero (or so he thinks) dog from a 2008 Disney animation.
Usuain Bolt took the record from his fellow Jamaican Asafa Powell (who broke the record three times, his best being 9.74 in 2007), so the strangely-pronounced US general is Colin Powell. According to Wikipedia: “Despite his parents’ pronunciation of his [first] name as /ˈkɑlɪn/, Powell has pronounced his name /ˈkoʊlɪn/ since childhood, after the heroic World War II flyer Colin P. Kelly Jr.[10] Public officials and radio and television reporters have used Powell’s preferred pronunciation.”
Prior to Powell, Maurice Greene held the 100m world record (9.79 in 1999), having taken it from Canadian Donovan Bailey (9.85 in 1996). Author Graham Greene suffered from bi-polar disease and the Private here is Beetle Bailey, from the Mort Walker comic strip.
Americans Leroy Burrell and Carl Lewis broke each other’s world records a few times, most recently Burrell with 9.85 in 1994, beating Lewis’s 9.86 in 1991. The dubious butler is Princess Diana’s servant Paul Burrell, famously involved in a Royal scandal. And the Oxford detective is Lewis, sidekick of the late Morse in the long-running TV whodunit.
Finally, for the bonus bun, “The Town of Baldwin” is the translation of ‘Trefaldwyn’, Welsh name for the town of Montgomery, the Powys town famous for its 13th century castle and church, and birthplace of poet George Herbert. The country singer, meanwhile, is Larry Gatlin.
US sprinters Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin both held the 100m record in the last decade (Montgomery with 9.78 in 2002 and Gatlin with 9.77 in 2006) but both subsequently had all their records and medals annulled after failing doping tests, which is why they don’t appear in the original solution.
