Nadav Kander

The low snap of a single gunshot bursts from eight speakers at once. Each speaker is positioned behind a single man, and each man is positioned more or less identically in a sprinter's crouch: his feet in the starting blocks, his legs slightly bent, his rear end higher than his shoulders, his fingers splayed on but not beyond the white chalk of the starting line. The color schemes of their Lycra uniforms are different — the blue and white of the United States, the red and white of Trinidad and Tobago, the green and yellow of Jamaica — but otherwise, at this moment, their heads down, their faces invisible, their bodies immobile, it is hard to tell the runners apart.

The individuation begins as soon as the sound waves conveying the gunshot traverse the two meters or so between the speakers and the ears of the men. Reaction times differ. The theoretical limit of reaction time in this race, taking into account the time it takes for the sound waves to reach the ears of the sprinters and the time it takes for their brains to process those sound waves and send a signal to their muscles, is 0.1 seconds. The starting blocks each contain Omega-built pressure sensors, and if these sensors detect a push from the foot of any runner beginning less than 0.1 seconds after the gunshot leaves the speaker, that runner is tagged with a false start and the racers must line up and begin again. There is no false start this evening, August 16, 2008, deep in the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing. It is the 100-meter finals of the XXIX olympiad, and the first man off the blocks, 0.133 seconds after the shot, is Richard Thompson, of Trinidad and Tobago. He is followed less than a thousandth of a second later by Walter Dix, of the United States. In the next three hundredths of a second, four more runners shove off against their pressure sensors. And then, finally, 0.165 seconds after the start of the race, in second to last place, Usain Bolt of Jamaica begins to run.

Nadav Kander

He's only been racing this distance for about a year, and the importance of a quick start is one of the things he's still getting used to. His specialty throughout his running career has been the 200 meters, and that's a distance for which the start isn't as crucial. Over two hundred meters, you can make up for lost time. That's not the case in the 100. He's had to work to overcome some of his sloppy starting habits. For example, he has a tendency to brush his left toe along the ground during the explosive burst from the blocks, generating counterproductive friction. He's gotten better, and usually manages to avoid doing that now, but he does it today, the front of his left shoe scuffing the track as he whips his leg forward to take his second stride. The shoe also happens to be untied, a sloppy mistake, no excuse.

Within the next few seconds, the so-called drive phase, the heads of the runners begin to come up, and their bodies start to straighten, their spines unfurling as their strides lengthen. Although they are still grouped closely together — were the race to end at the 2.4-second mark, Bolt would come in fourth place, by a hair — another point of differentiation now emerges: Bolt is the biggest man in the pack. He's six feet five inches tall, 210 pounds. That makes him three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than the second-biggest competitor.

During the drive phase, Bolt and the rest of the runners are all leaning forward at an unsustainable tilt, their torsos out ahead of where their feet impact the ground. They are basically in the act of falling down, face-first, but their legs, racing against gravity, are preventing that from happening, propelling them forward so hard and so fast that their bodies, instead of face-planting, begin to slowly rise up into a full upright position. Sprinters often describe this phase, when everything happens correctly, as being analogous to liftoff in an airplane.

Usain Bolt's top speed is simply significantly higher than anyone else's, ever.

By approximately the four-second mark, the drive phase has transitioned into the stage known as "full acceleration." The runners are now truly, in the classic sense, running, knees driving up ahead of their hips while their elbows drive back in the opposite direction, a plumb line between where the balls of their feet impact the ground and their chests cleave the air. And it is at this point that the ultimate difference between Usain Bolt and his competitors reveals itself. It is both a simple difference and one that, when you witness it, is hard to fathom.

When the other men reach their top speed, their limit, Usain Bolt continues to accelerate. By the fifty-meter mark, he has caught up to the leader. By the sixty-meter mark, a noticeable gap has emerged between him and the rest of the pack. By the seventy-meter mark, he is covering more than twelve meters of ground — about forty feet — every second, a pace faster than the speed limit for automobiles in most neighborhoods. Nobody has ever moved this fast before under his own power. Usain Bolt's top speed is simply significantly higher than anyone else's, ever.

His top speed is such a spectacle, so phenomenal, so searing that many who witness this race, who see Bolt cross the line in 9.69 seconds, breaking his own three-month-old world record by three hundredths of a second, don't notice, until they see the replay, what is perhaps the most salient and frightening thing about his performance: Approximately eighty meters into the race, twenty meters from the finish line, Bolt stops trying. It happens right after he throws a quick glance to the right, toward lane seven, the lane of his chief rival, a fellow Jamaican named Asafa Powell who held the world record before Bolt did. Prior to the start of the race, Bolt believed Powell was his only credible threat. Now seeing that Powell is nowhere in sight, that, indeed, no other runner is visible, Bolt lets something like a smile cross his lips. Then his arms stop pumping. He drops them to his sides, pulls his shoulders back, pushes his chest out, splays his fingers. His legs continue to cycle, but he no longer provides them additional impetus. He coasts. Several meters before he crosses the finish line, a full half second before he wins the 100-meter final by one of the widest margins in Olympic history, he brings his right fist up and thumps his chest.

As Bolt bounds toward his family waiting on the sidelines, kicking off his golden, unlaced shoes, beginning to do a Jamaican dance called the Nuh Linga, Ato Boldon, one of the men NBC hired to comment on the race, does his job and tries to put what he has just seen into words.

The frontiers of human performance, he says, sounding somewhat stunned, "have now gone into the realm of video-game times."

The sound of gunfire bursts from two speakers at once, one on either side of the television set. Usain Bolt flinches, flicks his left thumb forward on the nub of his controller.

"Run!" he shouts. "Run!"

Bolt is sitting on the edge of a king-sized mattress in his bedroom, one foot curled under him, the other planted on the floor. He's usually got a warm, open face, with a grin lurking near the surface, but right now his expression is as slack and empty as the wet socks hanging on the clothesline in his backyard. He and his younger brother, Sadiki, are playing a two-player mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Sadiki sits on a leather rocker next to the bedroom window, which is cracked open. A warm Jamaican breeze penetrates the room, causing the maroon-and-orange curtains to roil and billow inward, lapping up against Sadiki's cheek, but Sadiki doesn't seem to notice. He, like Bolt, is staring, rapt, at the fifty-inch Sharp HDTV that sits on the glass-topped entertainment console at the end of the bed.

They began playing soon after they woke up, at 10:00 A.M., and by 1:00 P.M., neither has moved, even to go to the bathroom, though Bolt has occasionally shifted his position, loosening his shoulders, stretching his back, switching from playing while sitting up to playing while lying on his stomach or his side. He's got scoliosis, a congenitally warped spine, and a significant portion of his training over the last few years has been devoted to dealing with this birth defect, trying to keep his back strong and supple.

At the foot of Bolt's bed is a partially unpacked suitcase. He got back almost a week ago from a publicity trip to Kenya, where he adopted a baby cheetah on behalf of the Zeitz Foundation for Intercultural Ecosphere Safety, a nonprofit that the chief executive of the Puma Corporation founded. Puma has been Bolt's sponsor for years, and his suitcase is basically a grab bag of the Puma freebies that make up the bulk of his wardrobe: sneakers, shorts, socks, shirts. Right now he's wearing khaki cargo shorts and a white tee. Under his bed, three new-looking pairs of sneakers are lined up, tongues lolling, next to a remote control and a sealed condom. Another condom sits on a chest of drawers next to the bed, along with a bottle of Jergens Age-Defying Lotion, a stick of Right Guard Xtreme deodorant, a bottle of Purelene Multivitamin Hair Food, a few ounces of Hugo Boss cologne, a ceremonial key to the city of Trelawny, and the passport he used on his trip to Kenya. On his next trip abroad, he'll have a new passport, since Jamaica's prime minister just made him an ambassador-at-large, a designation that comes with the perk of a customs-bypassing diplomatic passport, not to mention full diplomatic immunity.

Over the past few hours, he and his brother have hardly talked to each other, though Bolt did berate Sadiki at length when a terrorist's dog knocked Bolt's avatar down and started chewing his face off and Sadiki didn't do anything about it. "One thing," Bolt moaned, "I only needed you to do one thing!"

A couple of times they've had to pause the game when NJ, Bolt's best friend since first grade and personal assistant since Beijing, escorted visitors into the bedroom on business. A man named Clive Campbell, whom everyone refers to as "Busy," wanted Bolt's permission to provide the BBC with some footage he had of Bolt playing soccer. A woman named Kim from a local BMW dealership had a bunch of T-shirts she needed Bolt to sign. After Kim left, Bolt sent NJ out on a mission to track down a twelve-month Xbox Live subscription card, and he and Sadiki have been playing uninterrupted since.

Bolt was born twenty-three years ago and grew up, like Sadiki and NJ, in a remote village called Sherwood Content in the northwest quadrant of the island, a long way from here, the King's Vale gated community in Kingston, where Bolt's jet-black 2010 Skyline GT-R — a replacement for the 2009 BMW M3 he wrecked last year — squats in the driveway of his cozily swank whitewashed three-bedroom house, a few paces from the maid's entrance. Bolt's dad operated, and still does, a little shop in Sherwood Content that sells meat, eggs, milk. His mother worked in the fields, picking bananas, cassava, yams. Bolt's hometown remains the same sleepy place it's always been, though there's been a minor yam push there recently, with at least one company planning to export the local tubers worldwide, marketing them as the primal foodstuff of Usain Bolt.

There's another burst of gunfire and Bolt's portion of the screen reddens with blood. He's leaning forward a bit, his forearms resting on his thighs, his shoulders hunched, tense. More gunfire and he dodges to the right, both in the real world and the virtual one, his crosshairs losing their target. He sucks in air through his teeth, his whole body taut with effort, with anxiety, bracing for a final hit, another failure. But then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Sadiki comes through, finding the last terrorist, taking him out.

A banner unfurls on the screen — "Mission Accomplished" — and in the space of a heartbeat, Bolt relaxes, exhaling, flopping backward onto the bed, stretching his long legs out in front of him, pumping his fist, smiling, exultant.

It was close, but he made it. He won.

It's worth keeping in mind that there is a significant difference between the final seconds of Usain Bolt's gold-medal run in Beijing in 2008 and the final seconds of his victory this afternoon in Call of Duty. In the video game, right up until the moment Sadiki took out the final terrorist, Bolt was on edge, nervous, uncertain. It taxed him. He almost lost.

Beating the video game was a challenge for him. Executing the most dominant and effortless performance in the history of the Olympic Games was not.

Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, "hasn't been born yet."

Which raises the question: What would happen if the greatest athlete alive put as much effort into his training as he does his video games?

Network Osaka

Bolt is lying on his back on the concrete floor at the top of a set of crumbling aqua-painted bleachers, one arm on his chest, the other flopped out by his side, holding on to the leg of a nearby massage table, eyes closed, gasping. The bleachers overlook a raggedy track on the outskirts of the Kingston campus of the University of the West Indies. The grass of the track is a sun-faded, watercolor green, much paler than the green of the mountains that rise up just beyond it. The pounding of countless footfalls has worn the grass away entirely in places, leaving bald spots of red earth. Bolt has just run six 200-meter half-oval repeats on the track. It was his first serious workout in months, since his recent trip to Kenya was preceded by a lengthy media tour of New York City, where he found himself doing things like appearing on Jimmy Fallon and racing the staff members of ESPN.

"Hey, Usain."

Bolt opens his eyes, sees the Racers Track Club masseur standing over him. The masseur shakes his head, pats his own stomach while looking down at Bolt's.

"What?" Bolt says, grinning, pulling up his T-shirt, exposing a six-pack, though one that is perhaps a bit more insulated than those of many of the other runners here today. Before arriving at the track, Bolt had scarfed down a typical lunch: a sandwich of cheese patties and coco bread, eaten one-handed from a greasy brown paper bag, his other hand working the controls of the deejay deck in his living room. Bolt pulls his shirt back down. The shirt is, of course, another Puma. It features a stylized picture of Bolt striking his now famous "Lightning Bolt" pose, one arm stretched to the sky, the other pulled back as though drawing a bowstring. Under the picture, two words: "Who Faster?"

Bolt eventually sits up, pushes himself to his feet with an exaggerated groan, and strolls over to where some of the other runners are clustered together, talking about movies.

"Law Abiding Citizen," says a hurdler, and then offers a five-word review: "Yo. Moronic! That shit's bad."

"Funny?" Bolt asks.

"No, not funny. Not anything."

Bolt likes movies almost as much as he likes video games. He might even star in a movie himself soon. The producer of Pumping Iron, the old documentary about Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been talking with his manager and wants to shoot a feature-length documentary about Bolt. But he's got mixed feelings about it. He thinks the movie would probably be a dud: "It would be boring. I don't really do much. Training. Play video games. Play music. I'm always home."

The quietest and youngest runner of the group is an eighteen-year-old 100-meter specialist named Jason Young. Young, by one measure, is blessed: He came from Bolt's hometown, attended Bolt's high school, excelled there, attracting the attention of Bolt's manager, who decided to take Young under his wing. Bolt himself has been kind to Young, makes an effort, often invites him over to his place to hang out and play Xbox.

By another measure, though, Young, like every other up-and-coming 100-meter specialist in the world today, is cursed. Over the last several decades, up until last year, the world-record time in the 100 meters dropped in tiny steps, the world's top sprinters swapping it back and forth, shaving off a hundredth of a second every year or so. Two or three elite runners at a time always seemed to be within a toe of the mark, while a wider pool of runners brought up the rear, poised to take their place among the elite. Bolt, by replacing the incremental drop in the world record with an exponential one, by doing approximately thirty years of damage in a single year, has undermined the fondest aspirations of an entire generation. Who faster? Nobody. Here or anywhere. Not now, and probably not for a very long time.

Glen Mills, who has been Bolt's coach since 2005, is down on the field, watching another one of his runners skip sideways down a row of hurdles, the young man's legs kicking up and over each one like a chorus girl's. A digital stopwatch hangs from Mills's thick neck, dangling just above his potbelly. Mills has close-cut gray hair, narrow eyes, a perpetually sardonic expression. Were someone to have charted a graph depicting Bolt's story up to the point that Mills became his coach, it would have shown a steep parabolic trajectory, a rapid rise followed by a precipitous fall. Like many promising runners, Bolt had come out of nowhere, burned brightly for a few years — setting a number of junior records — then appeared to have burned out. In 2004, at seventeen years old, Bolt made the Jamaican national team and competed in that year's Olympic Games in Athens, but his performance there was poor: He never made it past the first round in his only event, the 200 meters. His progress stalled, then reversed.

"When I got him, he was injured," Mills says. "Also, his coordination and all those things were off. And his scoliosis was affecting his hamstring. So we had to do some work." Much of that work consisted of not working so hard. Mills cut down on Bolt's high-intensity workouts and put him instead on a training regimen that emphasized strength and flexibility, building up his core muscles to compensate for his problematic spine, honing Bolt's body and technique until he was ready to fully harness his gift. Although Bolt continued to compete, for the two years of 2006 and 2007, he didn't place first in any races. It wasn't until 2008 that Mills's training regimen came to fruition, and the world took notice of what had been taking root at this worn track on the grounds of an old Kingston sugar plantation.

Soon Mills noticed that some of his younger runners, realizing that they could never hope to match Bolt but not prepared to give up their world-conquering dreams, shifted their attention from the 100- and 200-meter distances to other events, to hurdles or longer distances in which they might still hope to make a mark. The 400, for example.

As it happens, a group of five 400-meter runners is rounding the oval right now, their last circuit of today's practice, and though it's not a real race, you can tell from across the field that they're trying hard, shoulders stiffening, cheeks bellowing, each wanting to win. Bolt and the others stand up and cup their hands to their mouths and start shouting encouragement. Bolt rarely races the 400, hates the long practices, the lung-searing, vomit-inducing arduousness of the extra training required to run that distance at an elite level. Still, he thinks that someday he might give the 400 a serious go. And the general consensus in the world track community is that if he were ever to dedicate himself to the 400, he could dominate it as thoroughly as he has the 100 and 200. And after that? Who knows. But he's kind of interested in the long jump, too. At this point, there's every reason to believe that Bolt is like Alexander in his prime, a young conqueror whose future conquests will not be determined by ability but simply by desire and discipline.

As the pack of 400-meter runners approaches the bleachers, the final bend, Bolt suddenly skips down the steps to the track. He's taken off his running shoes, is back in his usual pair of blue Puma flip-flops. When the runners come abreast of him, Bolt shoots a smile back at his friends in the bleachers, jumps out beside the straining, struggling runners, and sprints easily to the finish line in first place, arms raised in mock victory.

Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty

The route from the track back to Bolt's house passes a billboard that evidently has been up for a while. It's an ad for a local car dealership, and it features a picture of Asafa Powell leaning up against a Mercedes. "The Fastest Man in the World," it reads. Asafa Powell's world-record time in the 100, set in September 2007, was 9.74. Usain Bolt's latest, set at the World Championships in Berlin in August 2009, is 9.58. Incidentally, toward the end of that race, just as he had in Beijing, Bolt glanced over his shoulder and, seeing nobody was near him, slowed down before the finish line.

Powell and Bolt, though they train with different coaches, are friends. In fact, as soon as Bolt gets home, he will shower, change into slacks and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and head out to the Pegasus Hotel, which is hosting an event honoring the launch of the Asafa Powell Foundation. At the event, in front of a crowd of a couple hundred people dressed in suits and gowns, Bolt will present Powell with a check. Later, at the podium, Powell will mumble good-naturedly that public speaking, for him, is as impossible a task as beating Usain Bolt.

Other runners, past and present, haven't been so gracious. Carl Lewis, for example, suggested in 2008 that anyone who, like Usain Bolt, can drop his 100-meter time from 10.03 seconds to 9.69 in a year has to be viewed with skepticism.

Darvis Patton, an American sprinter who ran in the 100-meter final against Bolt in Berlin, was asked for a comment about Bolt immediately after the race. Patton shook his head, then echoed the video-game analogy Ato Boldon had employed the year before in Beijing, but with an ambiguous twist. "There are no words to describe him. He's like a created, game person," Patton said. Then he thought for a moment and added, "He's like a cheat code."

Bolt, of course, swears he's not cheating. He says he doesn't even like to take legal supplements, that he's willing to be tested anytime, anywhere.

But Bolt's manager, Norman Peart, is keenly aware that it will take more than words to make his client wholly credible. It's only natural that people are skeptical, he says. He brings up the cases of Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin, two American 100-meter champions whose careers were destroyed not long ago by drug revelations. Prior to the revelations, Peart says, Jones and Gatlin had repeatedly "sat down just like me and you, and they went, 'I have never!' And 'I'm gonna sue so and so!' And they cried. And then ..." He shrugs. "Just the same way [Bolt looks], that's the way Marion looked, that's the same way Justin looked. Who are we to believe?"

The problem is compounded by the fact that these days there are plenty of substances Bolt could be taking, from human-growth hormone to designer steroids, that remain effectively undetectable.

"You can beat the system," Peart says. "You try to get something they can't find. Whatever. So that's the thing in people's minds: Are these guys one step ahead?"

Actually, putting all questions of chemistry aside, Bolt is not just one step ahead but three. When he set his latest 100-meter record, it took him forty-one steps to reach the finish line. The second-place finisher, the American Tyson Gay, required forty-four steps to cover the same distance. So the simplest, most literal explanation for Bolt's speed is this: He cycles his stride nearly as quickly as other sprinters, but his stride length, owing to his longer legs, is significantly greater than theirs. Or even simpler: He's a tall man who runs like a shorter one.

"That's his gift," Coach Mills says. "Over everyone else. That's what makes him special."

And what's the explanation for this gift?

"Only the good Lord can tell you," says Mills.

Which is to say, whether you believe in Usain Bolt is ultimately a matter of faith.

There's another HDTV hanging on the wall in Bolt's living room, above a shelf that is packed, like most available surface area in this house, with various awards and memorials, including a two-foot-tall abstract bronze statue of Bolt in which he looks kind of like the Sandman villain from Spider-Man, his skin sloughing off in waves. The TV is tuned to MTV Jams, which is showing the video for the new Chris Brown song, "I Can Transform Ya," but you can't hear Chris Brown at all because Bolt is blasting, at club-level volume, from speakers hooked up to a set of Pioneer deejay decks on a coffee table, Bob Marley's "One Love." Actually, you can't really hear Bob Marley, either, because Bolt has used the mixer to fade Marley's vocals and is singing the chorus himself. He's sitting on an overstuffed leather sofa, holding a wired mic flush against his lips. A pair of headphones scissors his skull above his ears. He's got a high, paper-thin singing voice.

"Let's get together and feel all right," he croons, holding a hand out toward an imaginary crowd. "Sing it together," he says. "Sing it!"

Most of the people in this room — Sadiki, NJ, and Bolt's bodyguard — aren't paying any attention to him. They're all busy doing other things, texting or Facebooking or Web surfing. They're used to these midafternoon deejaying sessions of his, used to ignoring them. Deejaying fascinates Bolt. He even entered a deejaying competition recently, and he lost to a former Miss Jamaica World. Undeterred, he remains a diligent, if not particularly precocious, student, keen to learn and get better. Most afternoons, he spends an hour or so here in his living room and tries to get his utterly disinterested entourage moving.

When they refuse to sing along to "One Love," he finishes up one more round of the chorus himself, then fades the song all the way down.

"Yeah, and we end that one on a good note," he says in a sort of self-consciously baritone deejay voice, smiling broadly, then executes a few scratches on his deck's turntable before using his MacBook to cue up the next song.

"All right, let's try some hip-hop," he says. "No more reggae now. You know what I'm gonna play now? Anyone know what I'm gonna play?"

" 'You're a Jerk,' " NJ says, sounding bored, without looking up from his own laptop.

"You know?" Bolt says, looking surprised, and a moment later the first verse of the song, which is the same as the chorus, which is the same as the title, fills the room.

"You're a jerk! You're a jerk! You're a jerk!"

The song is by a group called the New Boyz. It's hard to call it a song, actually, since it's more of a single hook line repeated, ad nauseam, over a desiccated drum-and-synth beat. It originated last year in southern California and has since spawned a minor dance craze, The Jerk, which washed up in Kingston. Bolt throws himself into it, dancing as best he can on the couch, his arms executing rhythmic backward circles, as though he were doing a sort of flailing backstroke.

His friends continue to ignore him.

The head of the International Olympic Committee criticized Bolt's dancing during the 2008 Olympics, saying that Bolt's dances after his gold-medal performances in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and 4x100-meter relay — dances known respectively as the Nuh Linga, the Gully Creepa, and the Tek Weh Yuhself — smacked of showboating and were disrespectful to the other athletes. The criticism of his dancing was part of the larger critique that's often leveled against him, which is that he doesn't take running seriously enough. There's a perception in some quarters of the athletic community that Usain Bolt is the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of track and field, a prodigiously gifted individual who is also something of a wastrel and clown. Certain people, when they see a man perform superhuman feats, want that man to carry himself with superhuman gravity. Bolt, by this measure, never fails to disappoint.

And personally, he couldn't care less. When he was younger, he says, the only thing he wanted to do was please everybody around him, from his fans to the media. But after his disastrous showing in Athens in 2004, Bolt sussed out the heartless calculus that underpins critical and public opinion: "I figured out that as long as you're not doing good, they're going to criticize you, and if you're doing good, they're going to love you." The epiphany was a liberating one, in that it allowed him to disregard basically everything — from the dizzying adulation to the steroid speculation — that people have thrown at him since then. "I figured it out, and I was like, okay ... I've gotta put me first. And then I just started enjoying it."

He tries to get Sadiki to get up and do the Jerk, but Sadiki's busy on his BlackBerry, so about thirty seconds into the song, Bolt throws off his headphones, puts down his mic, jumps over the coffee table, and does it himself, his Puma flip-flops sliding on the tiled floor as he starts sort of skipping backward in place. It's a goofy dance, but he's a good dancer.

His entourage can't ignore him anymore, and they're watching him now, but he doesn't see them. He's got his eyes closed, his ears open, his body moving.

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