On the track, Usain Bolt was like Russell Crowe in “Gladiator.”
The
morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in
Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but
hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some
ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the
sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles
away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from
where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track,
and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and
going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating
a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He
shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to
do—the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the
tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small
boy in need of a pee. Bolt’s nerves were less twitchy than that.
Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he
seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a
gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest
fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive
for rum and Coke.