Remigino was always quick to help others

This was in 2009, 57 years after Lindy Remigino had captured the Olympic gold medal in the 100meter dash in Helsinki. This was at the Sportsmen’s Club on Main Street on a September night when Usain Bolt visited an adoring Jamaican community in Hartford.

Two men, the fastest men on the planet, met.

“How tall are you?” Remigino asked Bolt, who would go on to become the only sprinter to claim three 100-meter Olympic titles.

“I’m 6-5,” Bolt said. “How tall are you?”

“I’m 5-6,” said Remigino, barely coming up to Bolt’s shoulders. “And shrinking.”

It was there that two giants of track and field laughed and hugged.

Lindy Remigino, who died Wednesday at 87 of pancreatic cancer, proved he was the fastest man in the world on that July afternoon in 1952. He won another gold on the relay. For this he was given a great parade in Hartford, rode in a Cadillac convertible, and bestowed the city’s medallion of honor, a tribute only Charles Lindbergh and Gen. John J. Pershing had previously received.

Yet to know Remigino only as an Olympic champion is not to know this son of an Italian immigrant, born in Queens, named after Lindbergh, raised in Hartford, educated at Hartford Public and Manhattan College. Danbury coach Rob Murray was spot on when he called Remigino the gold standard of coaching in the history of Connecticut.

Sure, Lindy was fast, the fastest, but he ran faster to mentor young athletes, to serve as an ambassador for track and field. Sure, Remigino walked with