This time he remembered to do his shoelaces up. This time he ran hard all the way to the finish, looking neither right nor left, and left out the extravagant look-at-me gestures.
And this time he beat the most intimidating record in men’s sprinting; one those who were in Atlanta in August 12 years ago thought might stand forever.
Perhaps Usain Bolt had taken the criticisms to heart. Or perhaps, when he arrived in Beijing for the Games that will forever define his career, he was taking Michael Johnson’s great 200m record more seriously than his first target, his 100m mark, set three months ago.
When he ran 9,72 seconds back in May, bettering Justin Gatlin’s record by two-hundredths of a second, he must have known that, on the right night and under the right conditions, he could go faster. What happened in the Bird’s Nest on Saturday night would have come as no surprise to him.
Confronting Johnson’s epic achievement was another matter, however. The 200m is his distance; the one at which, aged 15, he became the youngest-ever world junior champion.
Earlier this year he managed to talk his coach, Glen Mills, into letting him run the 100m because he fancied it, but Mills always thought that he was built for the longer distance — even for the 400m — if only he were willing to do the work and endure the pain.
Considering that he has still to run the 100m a dozen times in competition, which makes him hardly a novice, the results have been respectable.
The way he ran 9,69 seconds made a record that traditionally comes down in hundredths look like a soft target, for him, at least. But when Johnson, on that electrifying Georgia night in 1996, settled into his unique shoulders-back style and persuaded his legs to whirr to a record of 19,32 seconds for the 200m, a mark was established that might have been sealed in a lead casket and buried in an unmarked tomb.
Everyone knew Johnson was good, but amazement was the reaction to an achievement that represented as much of a paradigm shift as Bob Beamon’s 8,90m long jump leap in Mexico City in 1968. Forget the late Florence Griffith-Joyner and her tainted 100m and 200m records, which have stained the record books for the last 20 years and may last another 20.
The fact that no one cast aspersions on what Johnson did is what made Bolt’s mission so serious.
Yes, he did a little dancehall steppin’ before stripping-off his tracksuit, and he repeated the archery mime before pointing at the word ”Jamaica” on his chest. But once he was in the starting blocks, the concentration was total.
In his first international appearances it was said that, at his height, he had trouble with his starts because he had to arrange his gangling limbs before hitting a smooth stride.
That has been disproved in Beijing, where his getaways have been near-perfect. At 0,182 seconds his reaction time was the fifth-fastest of the eight finalists, but within three or four strides he had begun to rip past them. When he came out of the bend, the contest was over.
Once again he moved majestically into the distance, leaving the rest looking as though they were in a separate race. And then came the moment that had been anticipated when we would see if he intended to make last Saturday night’s celebrations a permanent feature.
The truth was seen in his last strides. There was clear water, 5m of it, between Bolt and his nearest pursuer. But this time everything spoke of effort ratcheted to the maximum.
There was a grimace on his face, his fists were bunched tight, and he dipped in the textbook manner as he crossed the line, squeezing out the last hundredth of a second. And, by two hundredths, the record was his, along with the gold medal.
Now he becomes the ninth man in Olympic history to claim the 100m and 200m double, following Archie Hahn (1904), Ralph Craig (1912), Percy Williams (1928), Eddie Tolan (1932), Jesse Owens (1936), Bobby Morrow (1956), Valeri Borzov (1972) and Carl Lewis (1984); six Americans, one Canadian, one Soviet, and, now, a Jamaican.
None of his predecessors, however, broke both world records, and his times of 9,69 seconds and 19,30 seconds support anyone wishing to acclaim Bolt, who turned 22 on Thursday, as the greatest sprinter of all time. —