They competed on both quality and speed, as in who will be the first to 0-day the program which had to work 100%. Whoever got the 100% crack first won, anybody else's crack would get nuked. Them's the rules.
So, either we have gross incompetence across the entire information technology industry in general if it's impossible or slow, or the people disassembling custom filesystems and protections, bug fixing binaries and adding custom speed-loaders in record time are from another planet. Which one is it?
I've no idea who Usain Bolt is (or what it is, if it is a thing), so no clue what you are attempting to tell me with that allegory. No rows returned from the database. To me, it looks like
"cats are furry. Your argument is invalid."
Now, is "Hacker News" supposed to be where the information technology elite gathers, or is that a gross misnomer these days?
I don't think it's grossly unfair to assume people know the name of the fastest human being in the world.
It's also fine not to know, but your comment assumes we know who or what, for example, "allegory", "database", "cats" and "misnomer" are. My point is that every discussion assumes some knowledge, and if you lack it you can just look it up, or ask, without making allegories about cats and databases and huffing and puffing about information technology elites.