The mouth of the World's Fastest Man, flying along at a sprinter's clip and threatening to careen out of its lane, suddenly screeched to a complete halt yesterday. In mid-sentence, Usain Bolt looked at the clock on the wall, which read 10 minutes past midnight, and stopped talking for an instant. "Oh, I'm 22 now," the Jamaican birthday boy noted, then went right back into his riff on his own greatness, which no one in the room, or the entire world, could dispute.
"I blew my mind," he said, "and I blew the world's mind." His own blown mind should cause no worries - it will be put back together with another night of prodigious sleep and perhaps some more Chicken McNuggets, his pre-race meal of choice this week. But the world's mind may take some time to recover. Track and field, the Olympic Games and the sporting world at large witnessed something on Wednesday that cannot quickly be processed, for it involved the utter rewriting of the laws of human athletic possibility.
On a hot, steamy night that would have felt familiar in Kingston or the sugar cane fields of his native Trelawny, Bolt obliterated another world record, torching a world-class field in the 200m in a time of 19.30secs, which was .02 of a second better than American Michael Johnson's 1996 record, which once seemed as untouchable as any. He finished more than half a second - an eternity in the realm of sprinting - ahead of the field.
On top of his record-breaking run of 9.69secs in the 100m on Saturday, it gave Bolt an unprecedented double: no sprinter had set world records in the 100m and 200m in the same Olympics. Carl Lewis of the US, at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, was the last runner who even managed to win both in the same Olympics. "How fast can one human being go before there's no more going fast?" asked Kim Collins of St Kitts and Nevis, who finished sixth in the race, expressing the stunned disbelief of those inside the sport at what they have seen from Bolt in the past week.
Unlike in Saturday's 100m final, when Bolt eased up with 20 metres to go, preening and prancing across the finish line, this time Bolt ran straight through it, never even looking around to check on his lead, which was enormous. Why the different approaches? Because he already owned the world record in the 100m before the Olympics, having run a 9.72 in May. But in the 200m, his previous best still had been .35 of a second slower than Johnson's mark. "I saw I could get the record in the 200, so I told myself I wanted to leave everything on the track, and I did just that," Bolt said. "I told myself, 'If I'm going to get the world record, I must get it here'."
Bolt, 6ft 5in with a giant stride, represents a new prototype in sprints, replacing the old one of 5-9 cannonballs with low centres of gravity. Bolt turns his legs over just as quickly, but eats up more ground with each stride. "The stride - it's poetry in motion," said Renaldo Nehemiah, the former American hurdling champion. "He's not like a beast running. He's a gazelle, and he recognized the responsibility of seizing the moment, and he did it."
If Bolt's performance has signalled new possibilities for sprinting these last few days - he hopes to try for a third gold medal in the 4x100m relay - his country's overall performance also has underscored a new balance of power in a sport long dominated by Americans. As recently as the 2004 Athens Olympics, the US owned the sprints, sweeping the men's 200m and 400m, taking gold and bronze in the men's 100m, silver in the women's 100m and 200m, and gold in both 4x400m relays.
But this year, Jamaica, a country with a population less than one thousandth that of the US, have already seen Bolt win a stunning double and their women sweep the 100m. Just before Bolt's victory on Wednesday, they had two women, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Kerron Stewart, in the final of the 200m with the best qualifying times. Minutes after Bolt's run, Jamaica's Melaine Walter set an Olympic record in winning the women's 400m hurdles.
The Jamaicans will be overwhelming favourites in the men's and women's 4x100m. "We eat healthy. We have the natural talent. We train. And we have a tradition of being great athletes. It's a wonderful gift," said Olivia Grange, Jamaica's minister of information, culture, youth and sports. "We have the best coffee on the planet. We have Bob Marley. And now we have Usain Bolt. We are overjoyed and overwhelmed."
And it has all been done drug free. Bolt has been tested at least 11 times in 2008, according to Nick Davies, a spokesman for the world track and field federation. He also has been tested four times by the IOC - including three blood tests - since he arrived in China, Davies said. Bolt drove himself home after those races in a Honda Civic. But when he returns to Kingston, he will be greeted by a new BMW, a gift from his shoe company. In four days, everything has changed for Usain Bolt, for Jamaica and for track and field. * Washington Post