Centre stage is empty. Now Usain Bolt is gone, and Justin Gatlin is getting on, everybody is waiting to see who is going to take over as the world’s fastest man. Right now the main contender is Christian Coleman, a 21-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia. Coleman split Bolt and Gatlin when he won silver in the 100m at the world championships in London last year. In Birmingham on Saturday night he shredded his way through the world indoor 60m final in a championship record of 6.37sec, which was three hundredths off the world record he set last month.

Coleman’s run was all the better because it was against such a strong field. Between Coleman, his teammate Ronnie Baker and China’s Su Bingtian, it featured three of the seven fastest 60m sprinters in history. And while Coleman was able to take it oh so easy in the heats, Bingtian pushed him hard here in the final, right up to the line. Bingtian finished in a personal best of 6.42; Baker was another couple of a hundredths back in third place.

Coleman’s run was the highlight of a fun, and chaotic, night. Two days after Laura Muir won her first medal at a major global championships, a bronze in the 3,000m, she took her second, a silver in the 1500m. Before that, Eilidh Doyle won bronze in the 400m too. It looked for a time as though Britain had won another bronze as well: Elliot Giles finished fourth in the 800m, but was promoted to third and then demoted back down again. It all took 90 minutes to sort out, which must have made it the slowest 800m race in history.

Muir’s race was the best of the three that featured Brits. She finished almost a second back from the great Genzebe Dibaba, who won in 4min 05.27sec. But Muir fought her way past the defending champion, Sifan Hassan, on the back straight of the last lap. “I just ran my socks off,” Muir said. She had the kind of week that Alf Tupper used to put up with in The Tough of The Track comic strip each week, with a seven-hour taxi ride through a blizzard to make her first race back on Thursday.

The only difference is that Tupper used to win his races. Muir may well do that too soon enough if she carries on like this, although Dibaba will clearly take some beating. It has been eight years since she lost a race indoors, bar one disqualification, and she has just become the second woman to do the middle-distance double at the world indoors, after Gabriela Szabo.

Doyle was only running here to sharpen up her speed ahead of the Commonwealth Games, when she will be competing in her regular event, the 400m hurdles. She was well back from the eventual winner, the USA’s Courtney Okolo, but like Muir she found herself in a fierce scrap for second place. Okolo’s team-mate Shakima Wimbley passed Doyle coming off the final bend but it was a gutsy run. Doyle grew up just down the road from Muir and they even went to the same school. They must raise them tough in Kinross.

Doyle had made it through to the final after the Swiss runner Léa Sprunger was disqualified in the heats. For a while it looked as though Giles, who was born and raised in Birmingham, was going to get the benefit from a DQ too. He finished fourth in the 800m after he was passed by the USA’s Drew Windle in the final few metres. Then Windle was disqualified for jostling Giles earlier in the race. It was a close call and led to some disgruntled muttering about the home judging from a few suspicious American fans.

They were still arguing about the decision in the appeals room 90 minutes later. Then the judges finally announced that Windle had been reinstated after all. It was a messy business. There have been a lot of DQ decisions at these championships, and there is an idea that the judges are being a little too stringent. The winner of the men’s 400m, Spain’s Óscar Husillos, was disqualified as well, so Poland’s Pavel Maslak won the gold. There were some boos about that one, too.

Cruel as all that was for Giles, he was still happier about his circumstances than his team-mate CJ Ujah, the British sprint champion. Ujah was disqualified for a false start in the semi-finals of the 60m. His assessment ran to two words. The printable one was “indoors”.