Asafa Powell is 190cm tall and weighs 87kg. Christine Wearne is 35cm shorter and, at 42kg, is less than half his weight.
Powell was a world record holder and has officially broken the 100m 10-second barrier 98 times. Wearne's PB is 11.64s.
On Saturday night, Powell crouched on the blocks over Wearne's shoulder in the next lane. It was an odd couple in an odd race. He dwarfed her in everything – size, speed, achievement, profile.
"It was a thrill. I don't know many girls who can say they have raced Asafa Powell," Wearne said.
"He was the one with the pressure on. Maybe he might be scared that a girl might beat him."
The tiny Australian sprinter opposed a giant of the sport. At the baton change, Wearne was to hand her baton to Riley Day, a 16-year-old Year 12 student from a small inland Queensland town to race Usain Bolt. He needs no further explanation.
Day was practising how to sign her autograph last week. Bolt has signed a few.
"It's pretty incredible, it's every athlete's dream to race him," she said. "I just couldn't stop laughing when they told me. I was like are you kidding me? I mean are you kidding?"
The relay was emblematic of Nitro itself. It had stars, it had speed. It was inventive and amusing and in a way slightly pointless other than fun and racing being the point.
A relay of two men and two women from each team racing when each team can decide which legs the men or women race made for mismatches on certain legs but served to contrive its own interest and competition: fall behind one leg, make up ground the next.
It was an engaging if quirky novelty that with a crush of runners at the line – Australia's Jack Hale folded in the field in the last leg to claim third place – was ultimately good if unorthodox competition.
The relay, like Nitro, could be sneeringly derided as a starburst distraction from real athletics. So was the Big Bash League. Man v woman in same race, what does that achieve? Interest, for one.
The first night of Nitro, and it should be judged after three, was a qualified success. The crowds came, even if it did not completely sell out. It worked on TV.
The new events largely worked – the 60m sprint, which Powell won, and the men's elimination mile were two of the best events of the night, along with the 4x100m mixed relay and the mixed three-minute race.
Some events still take some explaining – like the elimination mile (the last runner in each of the first three laps is cut from the field, leaving three runners for the final lap) and the mixed three-minute race (women run for three minutes, then the males start their race from the point their teammate finished).
The night started uncertainly when Michael Frater, a world and Olympic sprint relay champion, ran like a club jogger in the 150m race and was lucky not to be last. That raised doubts about whether the Bolt Stars had come for the pay cheque alone.
Bolt turned to his team, smiling but unimpressed, and asked: "What have you guys been doing? You been training?"
The All Stars also finished last in the medley relay after Ryan Wilson, an Olympic 110m hurdles champion, was asked to run the 400m, a distance that was plainly 290m more than he is comfortable with. He collapsed over the line like a Sunday stroller.
Fortunately they were rogue results as the All Stars began to perform to their billing and besides reflected the idea of what happens when you move athletes out of their comfort zone.
Not all the new events worked: the women's elimination mile, unlike the men's, was flat and the javelin being judged on accuracy and distance didn't work as the zone to throw into on the field was too hard to see. These were teething issues and did not undermine the overall impact.
"It is the first time, we will find kinks, make it better, it was a good start for me," Bolt said.
"It was a lot of fun, we were experimenting, I was excited to run, next week might change it up for the fun it."
The new events, though, while they will be confronting for athletes and purists, they will find their own tactics. Which legs to run male or female runners will be one of those.
Athletes are not used to running these races in the same way reverse sweeps and ramp shots were initially cricketing party acts that had no place in the real game but have now become legitimate inventive options.
Critically the night was broadcast to the biggest markets around the world – US, China, India, the UK, Japan. How it is received there will be the real judge of whether it worked.