Fun and Games.(Beijing Olympics)

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.

In the end, come the final, he elected not to break the record so much as snap it like a bread stick. The clock stopped at 9.69, three-hundredths of a second faster than his previous record, set in New York earlier this year. To a sprinter, that is a gulf, and what was plain, to the bedazzled throng, was that he could widen it at will. Bolt is lofty for his sport, at six feet five (at first glance, you would tag him as a four-hundred-metre man), and he takes a while to get upright from the set position, but, once his stride is established, he is free to mold the rest of the contest into a monarchical stroll. In Beijing, reaction times--the getaway speed of a runner, measured from the crack of the pistol--flash up on the stadium screens, and they showed that Bolt the finalist had been sluggish off the blocks. What is more, after eighty-five metres he was already so far ahead of his peers, and so convinced of victory, that he swept his arms back like airplane wings, which must have slowed him down, and then, as a piece de resistance, thumped his chest--a single clap of the right palm to the heart--before he crossed the line. So here's the deal: once Usain Bolt gets a decent start, and if he can be bothered to finish properly, with a dip of the neck and no showboating, he might turn out pretty quick.

All of this provoked an instant debate. Was he not under obligation, given the occasion, to travel as fast as he could--get serious out there, before a watching world, and wrestle the record down to something superhuman, around the 9.60 mark? The opposing view was that, heck, if you can't have a personal parade in the Olympics, when can you? Bolt set a new record anyway, and thus laid down another threshold that he will cross when he pleases, at some grim-faced meet in Qatar or Gothenburg. For the moment, he was like Russell Crowe in "Gladiator," killing off the competition and then heating the blood of the masses with a taunting, rhetorical cry: "Are you not entertained?" We were amused, for sure. The obvious reaction, to such a spectacle of dominance, was not to marvel but to laugh. After all, Bolt's domination was an innocent one, shod in golden sneakers and purged of ill will, and to witness it in a land where mastery is not always so benign, and where the government is unlikely to be entertained by any spirits who try to run free, felt like a blessing and a mischievous joke.

The long day closed, in other words, on a mirror image of its beginning. The first heroes to enter the stadium, that morning, had been the leaders of the twenty-kilometre walk, an event considered hilarious by everyone on planet Earth except the athletes themselves. Somehow, wordlessly, a deal has been agreed on: we will not giggle, for politeness's sake, and they will continue to propel themselves, year in, year out, as if learning to moonwalk too soon ...