LONDON – In between mugging for cameras before he went into the blocks and preening around the track after his race Sunday at the Olympic Stadium,
Jamaica’s Usain Bolt shrugged off a slogging start to zoom to a new tier in athletics.
Bursting to victory in the 100-yard dash in 9.63 seconds, Bolt broke his own Olympic record and became the first man to twice cross the finish line the winner in the Olympic race that confers world’s fastest man status.
In 1988, U.S. sprinter Carl Lewis was awarded a second straight gold in the event only after Ben Johnson was stripped of his victory for failing a drug test.
But Bolt, whose time was second only to his world-record 9.59 at the 2009 world championships in Berlin, wasn’t ready to accept his self-professed goal of becoming known as a “living legend” just yet.
“That’s the first step,” said Bolt, who also seeks a repeat gold in the 200.
“Then I’ll consider myself a legend.”
Plenty already do.
Even before Sunday, the charismatic Bolt was the buzz of the games, the one other Olympians wanted to meet, reporters flocked to and fans from all over the world embraced.
Add Sunday to the mix, and he’s at least a co-face of the London Games.
“He’s the Michael Phelps of our sport,” said U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin, who finished third, in 9.79 seconds, behind Bolt’s countryman Yohan Blake, 9.75.
“At the end of the day, the best man won today.”
Bolt’s victory Sunday wasn’t by the whopping margin it was in Beijing, where his 9.69 won by 0.20 seconds and would have been by more if not for his antics in the final 10 meters.
And considering his habitual discomfort in the blocks left him with only the fifth-fastest start, it hardly was the perfect race.
“I’m not even going to say yes (it was), because I know my coach is going to say no,” he said.
But the race itself was an instant classic, in more ways than one, living up to its billing as the most anticipated event of the games.
For the first time in Olympic history, seven men ran it under 10 seconds.
No race, Olympics or otherwise, ever has had faster finishes from third to seventh place.
The top four finishers were fast enough to have won any Olympics before 2008, perhaps all the more a miserable thought for oft-injured U.S. sprinter Tyson Gay – whose 9.80 was .01 behind Gatlin. As he left the track, Gay was in tears and wondered what he might have done differently at race’s end.
“It’s tough,” he said. “But I have no excuses.”
Despite his overpowering performance in Beijing, Bolt had been perceived as vulnerable at the London Games for a variety of reasons.
He had been disqualified for a false start in the 100 at the 2011 world championships, been beaten in the 100 and 200 by Blake in the Jamaican Olympic trials and was believed to have injuries.
“There was a lot of talk,” he said.
At least some of it permeated Bolt, who said repeating was much more difficult than winning the first time because “sometimes you lose sight of what’s going on around you” amid the praise and hoopla.
That changed, he said, when Blake handled him in the trials. With that, he said, Blake “knocked on my door (and said), ‘Usain, wake up: This is an Olympic year. I’m ready. Are you?'”
And so he was, as he noted, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence from England.
But for all Bolt’s swagger, he wasn’t quite himself when he came out of the tunnel for the race. And not just because he felt Blake outperformed him with his introductory clowning. The false start of a year ago, he acknowledged, “does play on my mind.”
Then, amid an Olympics he already believes has been beset with “weird, silly rules” for rules’ sake, an official was meddling with where he should line up.
“I thought, ‘Really?'” he said.
Add it all up, and the seemingly infinitely confident Bolt was, in fact,”slightly nervous.” But everything changed when he was introduced to a booming ovation.
“It was just a wonderful feeling,” he said. “All those jitters went away.”
Bolt didn’t start to get free from the clump until midway through the race.
But then away he went, to a place no one else has been – with more to come inthe 200 later this week if he wants to be a legend in his own mind.
