My favourite game: Usain Bolt wins Olympic 200m gold at Beijing 2008 - MW

No one will beat Michael Johnson's record. Anyway, not in my youth, maybe a distant day when I'm old and gray, and the game has changed with each recognition.

Remember when he ordered it at the Atlanta Olympics in region 96? It was his idyllic style, his back was straight, the car was low, his hands were clenched, his legs were spinning so fast that his golden tips looked like sparks from Catherine's wheel. He has his own technique, and that may explain why he is so fast. He finished in 19.32 seconds, three tenths of his own world record. The man in second place, Frankie Fredericks, ran faster than anyone else, and finished five meters behind.

For the next decade, no one has approached it. Tyson Gay ran it in 19.62 seconds, Xavier Carter in 19.63 seconds, Wallace Spearmon in 19.65 seconds. They were the second, third and fourth fastest sprints in the 200m in history, and the time that Johnson Johnson went so far ahead of them that it was in a completely different world. Three of the fastest sprinters in history, and they roam the foothills of Olympus. There was another candidate Wannabe, a skinny 20-year-old from Jamaica named Usain Bolt - a lazy trainer, they said, but lightning fast among their juniors.

Bolt broke a 100m world record in May, two months before the Beijing Olympics. Then this Sunday evening in Beijing, he did it again, in the Olympic final. You remember, everyone did it, it started as a loose armor but picked up so many tracks in the middle of the meter that he stopped sprinting and spread his arms out to the sides, then went return. in the crowd and snapped his chest as he reached the finish line. There are so many good athletes that they make victory so easy, so few are so good that they see it that way. He is one of them.

What few remember now is just the sadness of some of them, the way the President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, called him for disrespecting his competitors and let's say it is how we see him as a champion. Watching Bird Nest Nest Stadium was not the bluster that bothered me, but the moments of separation cost him the price. Later, we knew that if Bolt ran so fast - Johnson never did - it meant that he and we could never find out what he was capable of. Its capacity, where its limits, our limits, really lie.

Until four days later, when we found out.

Bolt later explained that he was embarrassed to break a 100m world record because it was his. 200m milestone, Johnson can't 19.32 seconds, that's what he wants. One day, perhaps, said Johnson, but not now, not yet. According to him, Bolt did not have the speed endurance or the curve management technique, not at the level he needed to beat this time. Who knows better? So far, everything he has done has been through the heat, and here he struggles on the starting line, no matter what the world.

Then the gun goes away. His departure was smooth and smooth, halfway up the Bolt curve which made the four men stagger outside him, at the end of the curve he had passed a few meters in front of them, and now c 'it was just running against history, chasing the ghost of Johnson. Bolt was over there on the capacity line, pushing, pushing, pushing. This time it was slow, without early celebration, it even threw the head and chest forward in an integrated finish. The stopwatch stopped at 7:30 p.m. He did it by 2%. And I remember thinking, in the stands: Sword So here is what it looked like when God tried the line.

MW