Two for The Show

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt roared to his second straight gold medal in the 100 meters, silencing his critics and finishing with his usual flourish

HALF THE LONG straightaway remained on Sunday night in the final of the 100 meters, the eight sprinters rushing over the five Olympic rings painted on the homestretch of the blazingly fast pale-orange track. This was nearly the same spot on the oval where the U.K.'s Jessica Ennis and Mohamed (Mo) Farah had passed within inches of each other on the previous night, she with a heptathlon gold medal in hand, he about to chase (and win) one in the 10,000 meters. London's Olympic Stadium had trembled with emotion as the host nation won three gold medals in 46 minutes. Now in the middle of the 100-meter field, Justin Gatlin of the U.S. held a narrow lead over a fading Asafa Powell of Jamaica, but to his right was the looming presence of 2008 Olympic champion and world-record holder Usain Bolt of Jamaica; to his left was Bolt's countryman and training partner, the precocious Yohan Blake. The stadium shook again.

It is the singular quality of this moment that defines Olympic achievement. For all but a very select number of athletes—tennis players, basketball megastars—the Olympics are a stage larger than any they will inhabit in their lives. Weeks, months and years of solitary practice are rewarded—or not—with nations watching, rapt and expectant. So it is for even the one track athlete who transcends his sport's niche world of live streams, tape delay and word of mouth pulsing through the digital underground. Before London, Bolt, 25, who earns more than $10 million a year through endorsements, promotional fees and prize money, had run just three meets outside Jamaica in 2012—in Ostrava (Czech Republic), Rome and Oslo. He is very much at home on the biggest stages, devising complex pantomimes to entertain crowds, yet he walks those stages infrequently.

Here then, in any sprinter's seminal time, Gatlin saw open track in front of him with 50 meters left. He had gotten the best start in the field—not the fastest official reaction time, but the best early steps, what sprinters call their drive phase. NBC analyst Ato Boldon would tweet that Gatlin's first step "might be the best I've ever seen in a big race." Gatlin said afterward, "I wasn't going to sit back and say, 'This is the Bolt Show.' I came out here to win. But I also knew that Bolt was going to step up."

One lane to his left Gatlin could see a surging Blake, who had beaten Bolt in both the 100- and 200-meter races at the Jamaican Olympic trials. Then to his right Gatlin saw Bolt. But first he felt Bolt. "He's 6'5", and when his legs start lifting, you feel him," said Gatlin. At the beginning of the Olympic logo, Bolt was narrowly behind Gatlin; by the end of it, a distance of perhaps 15 meters, he was clearly in the lead. As Blake battled Gatlin, farther to the left Tyson Gay of the U.S. desperately tried to stay in medal contention but gained no ground.

Then came the instant at which the outcome was obvious and magnificent. Bolt eased away from Blake, Gatlin and Gay. "The last 50 meters," said the 22-year-old Blake, "that's when he decided to pull up beside me, and I said, 'Wow.'" The move was not as overwhelming as his breathtaking acceleration—or, technically, he slowed down more gradually than the other runners—in Beijing four years ago, when he ran off the world's television screens. But it was every bit as effective. He did not beat his chest as he had in China but instead clenched his teeth and hacked at the air with his fists. He thought about his world record of 9.58 seconds, set at the 2009 world championships in Berlin, only in the final strides. "Too late," he said. (But Richard Thompson of Trinidad and Tobago, who finished seventh in the race after winning silver in Beijing, said, "There's a high probability that he will break the record again, maybe even this year.")

The final time was 9.63, an Olympic record—Bolt's 9.69 in Beijing had been the old mark—and the second fastest in history. He towed behind him the swiftest collective 100: three men under 9.80 seconds (silver medalist Blake in 9.75 and bronze medalist Gatlin in 9.79), and seven of the eight finishers under 10 seconds for the first time in any 100.

In the afterglow of the win, Bolt treated the crowd of more than 80,000 (including Team USA basketball players Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant and LeBron James) to the Full Usain. He did his To Di World pose (often called the Lighting Bolt, which it is not, and never has been). He held an Olympic mascot in his arms. He did a somersault on the ground in front of the bleachers. "He's a showman," said Gatlin. "And he puts on a great show."

IN THEIR transcendence of their respective sports, Bolt is easily compared to U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps. As in Beijing, the London Games took a sudden turn from a Phelps-O-Rama to a Bolt-O-Rama midway through, as if the swimming star had emerged from the pool, drenched and hyperventilating, and handed a baton to Bolt. Yet their personalities inside the arena are spectacularly different. The reserved Phelps prefers to sit alone with noise-canceling headphones affixed to his ears. "I wanted to share my joy with the crowd," said Bolt of his ebullient, crazy victory lap. In an interview with SI at the end of the 2011 season, Bolt had said, "People love that stuff. And it's my personality. That's just me."

Running that fast with everything at stake has earned Bolt the right to command the stage. Gay understands. Five years ago he was at the top of the sprint world, having won world titles in the 100 and 200 meters at the 2007 world championships. But the following spring Bolt, a promising 200-meter runner since his mid-teens, took up the 100 and overwhelmed the sport. After Gay's fourth-place finish on Sunday, he stood sobbing in front of the media, his shoulders heaving with emotion. "I gave it my best," he said. "Ain't nothing else I could do. I don't have excuses, man; I gave it my all. I feel like I let a lot of people down."

Gay was not alone in his devastation. LaShawn Merritt, the defending gold medalist in the 400 meters, ran only a few steps in his opening-round race and then pulled up because of a hamstring he had injured in Monaco two weeks earlier, the worst possible time.

Sanya Richards-Ross understands. She came to London as the most accomplished 400-meter runner in U.S. history, the American-record holder (48.70 seconds in 2006), a world champion and a two-time Olympian. She was the gold medal favorite in 2008, but unlike Bolt she did not show up on race day, instead running too hard in the first 200 meters and crumbling down the stretch to finish in the bronze medal spot behind Christine Ohuruogu of Great Britain.

"In 2008, what I learned was that you don't win the race until you win the race," Richards-Ross says now. On Sunday she won the race not with style but with guts. She ran more intelligently but still needed a grinding final 50 meters—right over that logo—to hold off Ohuruogu (silver) and DeeDee Trotter (bronze) and win in 49.55 seconds. Only one gold medalist, Ohuruogu, had run slower in the last 40 years, but that was of little consequence.

Jenn Suhr would understand. Four years ago she finished second in the pole vault to world-record holder Yelena Isinbaeva of Russia. But on Monday night in London, in a cold, windblown rain, Suhr won the gold medal while Isinbaeva was consigned to the bronze.

As her nation's living, breathing face of track and field at these Games, Ennis understands too. Four years ago Ennis missed the Olympics with stress fractures in her right foot, yet in the intervening years she had become adored, with advertising campaigns for Olay and Aviva on billboards around London. On the morning of the heptathlon's first day, columnist Simon Barnes wrote in The Times of London, "We love Jess because Jess is Jerusalem: beautiful, talented, vulnerable, a perfect emblem of the green and pleasant land we long to live in. She is us. She is the people we would like to be, the place we would like to live in."

So Ennis embraced the moment like Bolt and Phelps and won the heptathlon by 306 points, the third-largest margin in Olympic history. She clinched the victory in great style by wiring the fastest heat of the 800 meters, sprinting down the homestretch to win in 2:08.65 and then falling to the track in tears as the crowd roared its approval. Of the fans, she said, "They lift you so much."

They lifted redheaded long jumper Greg Rutherford of Britain to a surprise gold medal. And they lifted Farah and Galen Rupp, a Somali-born Brit and an Oregonian, who have trained together in Portland for the last 18 months under coach Alberto Salazar. Farah's goal was to bring Great Britain its first long-distance track medal in history (other than in a five-mile race, a century ago, that's no longer run); Rupp's was to take a giant step toward reestablishing U.S. distance running.

Both succeeded. On the same night that Jamaica's Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, yet another big-stage performer, defended her Beijing gold medal with a narrow victory over silver medalist Carmelita Jeter of the U.S., Farah and Rupp beat a 10K field that included two-time gold medalist and world-record holder Kenenisa Bekele. They did it by running the last lap in 53.8 seconds and the last 800 meters in 1:55, with Farah finishing less than half a second in front of Rupp.

For the home nation it was the crowning finish to an unprecedented night, one that rivals the so-called Magic Monday from Sydney in 2000 (Cathy Freeman, Haile Gebrselassie and others in a rush of thrilling performances). Back in the winter Rupp had talked about the heat on Farah to win at home. "I don't envy Mo," Rupp had said. "He's going to have a bunch of people cheering for him, but all that stress." Now they embraced a few steps beyond the finish line. Rupp's medal was the first for a U.S. distance runner since Billy Mills's shocking gold in 1964 and the first by a non-African-born runner since 1988.

BUT NO athlete in track and field at the Games rises to the moment the way that Bolt does. He was like so many sprinters in his approach to the 100 meters, motivated by other's slights and doubts. And the skeptics had a point. He'd been out with an injured back for the latter half of 2010 and then false-started out of the 100 last summer at the world championships in Daegu, South Korea. His back problems flared again this summer, and Blake took him down in Kingston. "A lot of people doubted me," said Bolt after taking gold on Sunday. "A lot of people said I couldn't win. I wanted to show the world that I'm still Number 1, the best."

Bolt was not nearly finished in London. He was scheduled to run the 200-meter final on Thursday night, and if his endurance matches his short-sprint sharpness, he could threaten his world record of 19.19. He will surely run the 4 √ó 100-meter relay on Saturday, in which Jamaica is favored, and there is buzz that he might attempt the 4 √ó 400 relay as well, though he despises the pain of the 400 meters. Bolt likes to say that he wants to become a legend. Sometimes he does this in a comic basso profundo, and sometimes he seems quite serious. One never knows with Bolt. But the words and tone are insignificant. His work most eloquently expresses his greatness.

"Championship races, for me, it just happens. It all comes into perspective. It's what I need. I show up on the day."

—Usain Bolt, summer 2011

"A lot of people doubted me," Bolt said. "I wanted to show that I'm still Number 1."

SI.COM

Usain Bolt's place in history, in words as well as portrait and action photographs at SI.com/olympics

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Photograph by ROBERT BECK

Speed of Lightning Bolt (7) blew past the fastest field in history, with seven of eight runners finishing under 10 seconds, breaking his own Olympic mark with a 9.63.

TWO PHOTOS

BILL FRAKES

Almosts for Americans Gatlin, who would finish third behind Blake, felt the powerful Bolt before he saw him, while Rupp (below) closed hard on his training partner, Farah, but couldn't overtake him in the 10,000.

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Photograph by ROBERT BECK

Double Standard Jamaicans dominated the 100-meter distance, with Fraser-Pryce (7) outpacing Jeter (5) to defend the title she won in Beijing.

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PETER READ MILLER (SI.COM)

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Photograph by ROBERT BECK

Guts and Glory The most accomplished 400-meter runner in U.S. history, Richards-Ross made sure she didn't repeat her mistake of 2008, churning through the final 50 to claim her first gold.