The Olympic games in Rio are now history and while I was watching some of the track and field events, Al Michaels gushed over the exploits of Usain Bolt as the world’s fastest man. Let’s give credit where its due – this guy Bolt is pretty fast on his feet. But he’s not the World’s Fastest Man. Not even close. That title could go to any number of men – let’s run through the list.

The first men who come to mind are racers who have run exceedingly fast at Bonneville. My favorite is the Speed Demon because I know George Poteet and Ron Main but more importantly, I know the man who makes the horsepower – Kenny Duttweiler. The Speed Demon crashed a couple of years ago and the new car has made its debut on the salt and set a record. I’m sure they’re working their way up to exceed the speed that they’ve already achieved – an astonishing exit speed of 462 mph. Friends, that’s 677 feet per second.

While that’s fast, the English fighter pilot Andy Green drove the Thrust SSC, a turbine-powered car that pushed the ultimate land speed record to 763.035 mph to become the first vehicle to exceed the speed of sound on the ground. There’s a photo of the shockwave extending something like 150 feet on either side of the car as it exceeds the speed of sound. This happened at BlackRock Desert in Nevada October 15^th, 1997.

This Red Bull photo shows Felix Baumgartner standing on the precipice of history.

While that’s stupid fast, there’s a human who has gone even faster – and he didn’t need an engine to make it happen. All he needed was a little help from gravity and a jump from an altitude of 127,852 feet! Of course, I’m talking about Felix Baumgartner who jumped out of a pressurized container held aloft by a balloon on the edge of space. Over 27 million people who watched that attempt live online on October 14, 2012. The shot of him standing on the ledge of the gondola on the edge of space is perhaps the most amazing photo I’ve ever seen. It’s mesmerizing.

Baumgartner’s jump was intended to set a new world’s record for The World’s Fastest Human. Power & Performance News editor Cam Benty and I were having lunch recently and I mentioned that I was going to write this column. Cam mentioned that he had met Baumgartner and had toured the Red Bull hanger in Germany. Red Bull is the company that backed Baumgartner’s effort.

After stepping off the landing of his gondola, Baumgartner eventually hit the record speed of 833.9 mph – or an altitude-adjusted speed of sound number of Mach 1.25. Think about that. This guy is in nothing more than a pressurized space suit attempting to avoid a flat spin that could kill him all while falling faster than the speed of sound. I’ve ridden in the back seat of an F-16 which was thrilling in its own right with 9 g’s trying to push all the blood out of my head. But I can’t imagine hurtling through space at that speed watching the ground come up at you!

During my conversation at lunch with Cam, a guy stepped up to us from the next table and said “I couldn’t help but overhear. I don’t think your numbers are right because terminal velocity for the human body is only about 200 mph.” He was holding a tablet so obviously he had looked it up. That’s when I said “That’s probably correct, but that’s at roughly what, 10,000 feet? Baumgartner started his free fall from over 120,000 feet where the air is a lot thinner and you can go a LOT faster!”

Cam and I told him to look up the Red Bull Stratos effort and I saw him spend about 15 minutes studying his laptop. We moved on to other topics but before the guy left, he said – “You’re right. That was very cool. I learned something today, thanks!”

That’s when Cam informed me he thought a Google executive had gone faster by dropping from a higher altitude. I then had something to learn and discovered that while Alan Eustace did freefall from an even greater altitude of 135,889 feet, he only achieved a speed of 821.45 because he was using a drogue parachute to prevent the dreaded flat spin. My use of the “only” qualifier makes this attempt sound trivial – which it certainly is not. Both are equally amazing attempts although Eustace never received half the attention that Baumgartner’s effort achieved. I guess that’s because Eustace didn’t spend the millions of dollars that Red Bull did.

So there appear to be many men who are both faster and quicker than Usain Bolt. But because their used machines to help them achieve these records, the stick and ball people completely discount them. They all deserve acclaim. And they all are a whole lot quicker and faster than I’ll ever be. I wonder who has the record for the fastest ’65 Chevelle?