Blistering Usain Bolt gives us reason to believe

Nothing can elevate sport higher than a sprinter. Nothing can bring sport lower than a sprinter. On Saturday, sport was elevated and the world rejoiced once again in the greatest race of them all; in the sight of the fastest man on earth; in the joy of the fastest man of all time. And alongside this, there was a second impossible spectacle: that of an entire world wanting to believe.

I believe. O Lord, help thou my unbelief. Can you seriously believe in anyone who can run the 100 metres in even time? Can you believe in a person who annihilates the world record, massacres a field in which six people ran sub-ten, and does so without even trying?

We want to all right. We are awash, we are drowning in belief, but still we cling to the wreckage of disbelief for security. Or is it the other way round?

It was the race of a lifetime for all of us who were in the stadium on Saturday night, one of those for-all-time moments of sport. There has been nothing like it since 1988 and I am inclined to think that this was even better. It was in 1988, of course, that Ben Johnson won in a miraculous time – 9.79sec, why is it that only 100metre records stick in my mind? – and then tested positive.

Usain Bolt won the men’s 100 metres by two tenths, the sprinters’ equivalent of a country mile, the biggest winning margin in 40 years. And he won grinning. He won spreading his arms, thumping his chest and doing the high-step. He won dancing. How fast would he have gone had he run all the way? He still set a world record of 9.69, and I expect I’ll remember that figure as well. What’s more, he won with his left shoelace undone.

It was a thrilling spectacle, a new revelation of human possibilities. And that’s why, in the space of little more than nine-and-a-half seconds, track and field athletics went from a discredited and sneered-at activity to the world’s sexiest spectacle.

This was the detonation of a star, a supernova, and now there is nothing the world wants more than to see Bolt run what he considers his real distance, the 200 metres. He’ll have to run through the 100-mark then. What will he clock, do you think?

You see how we get sucked in. No matter how many times we sing The Who’s anthem, Won’t Get Fooled Again, we still find ourselves going down the same route. We want heroes, we need heroes, we want to see the fastest man in the world. It is for our sake, then, that sprinters stoke themselves up on drugs. If it weren’t for us, there’d not be much point.

I wanted to believe in Linford Christie, who won the 100 metres gold at Barcelona in 1992, but even in believing, I was racked by unbelief. And Christie, some years later, tested positive, and I was left feeling a bit of a fool. By the last Olympic Games, I didn’t even go to the track to see the 100 metres. The winner, Justin Gatlin, later tested positive.

But this time around, I found that terrible sneaking hint of belief creeping back in. I began to get intrigued again. I started to watch Bolt in the heats and I was captivated. The arc of the story was perfect, its climax was close to impossible. And I wanted to believe that it was not a fairy story, that it was not a drugged hallucination. I wanted it to be real. Am I a fool again?

Well, I suppose I’d sooner be caught believing in something phoney than sneering at something true. I know Bolt has been tested over and over again since he arrived in China. I know, beyond question, that I – that we all – have seen something utterly remarkable, something that will be remembered for ever. But for what reason? Help thou my unbelief.