What A Finish

Attention immediately turned to his future. Bolt is so young and so relatively green that track nuts are agog with speculation over how low he can go. (Others, of course, are agog with speculation on whether he is using performance-enhancing drugs; he did not test positive in Beijing.) "He just started lifting weights this winter," said Donovan Bailey, the Jamaican-born Canadian who won the 100-meter gold medal in 1996 and has known Bolt since he was in his mid-teens. "He's really new at this. I think if he gets a tailwind, he can take the 200-meter record down another tenth of a second. The 100?"—Bailey raised his hands defensively—"who knows? Nine-five? I mean, he's not like anything we've ever seen, and he's still learning."

There would be an encore in Beijing, in the 4×100-meter relay. Last Friday on the morning of the final, Jamaica's Asafa Powell, the former world-record holder in the 100, who has been thoroughly usurped by Bolt, called his brother, Nigel. "Pay attention tonight," he told Nigel, who was in Beijing. "You're going to see something special."

With Bolt running the third-leg curve and passing to Powell, who was long in the clear and freed of the demons that have visited him before in close championship races, Jamaica ran 37.10 seconds, obliterating the world record of 37.40 set by the United States at the '92 Olympics and tied a year later by the U.S. at the world championships. "We talked about the record before the race," said Bolt, whose tally was unprecedented in Olympic track history: three gold medals, three world records, all by wide margins.

AS EASY AS Bolt made most of his sprints appear, every ounce of effort was visible in Clay's decathlon victory. The 2005 world champion prepared meticulously for Beijing. He passed on the housing in the Olympic Village and instead stayed with his three coaches in an apartment 500 meters from the Bird's Nest to make coming and going easier. On the first day of competition he built an 88-point lead over Andrei Krauchanka of Belarus, despite the heat and humidity and a poor performance in the high jump. That night, after a massage, an ice bath and takeout Japanese food, Clay finally fell into an uneasy sleep at 2 a.m. and was awakened at 5 to begin Day 2.

At the '05 world championships Clay endured wild swings in temperature, windblown sheets of rain and even a lightning delay. At the time he called it the toughest competition of his life. "This one was tougher," Clay, 28, said after he won the gold. "Something about the Olympic Games." Fourteen of the 40 decathletes who started on Thursday morning had dropped out by Friday evening's 1,500 meters, the 10th event. Clay had built a massive lead and staggered home last but still won by 240 points. He dropped to the track on his back, his chest heaving.

That win, and the one by Merritt, who led a U.S. sweep in the 400 meters with the largest margin of victory ever in that distance at the Olympics (.99 of a second over 2004 gold medalist Jeremy Wariner), gave a palpable sense of salvation to Team USA. The victories came after a 30-minute span early on Thursday evening in which both the men's and women's 4×100-meter relay teams dropped the baton on the final pass of the semifinals. It was the fifth time in the last 12 major global championships that the men had failed to complete the race and the second consecutive drop in the Olympics for the women.

Yet it was hardly an unsuccessful Games for the U.S., which finished with 23 medals, two fewer than in Athens in 2004 but six more than in Sydney in '00, which included the loss of Marion Jones's five medals, which were stripped from her for using performance-enhancing drugs. Seven of the U.S.'s medals in Beijing were gold (one fewer than '00 and '04). But it was last Saturday—the final night of track—that Americans enjoyed their greatest redemption.

Shortly after Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele added the 5,000 meters to his 10,000 win, Felix and Richards won gold medals in the 4×400-meter relay, salving earlier frustration. Each had once hoped to double in the 200- and 400-meter races, but track's international governing body would not change the race schedule—as it had once done for Johnson—to enable the attempt. It got worse. Richards struggled home to a bronze in the 400, and Felix was beaten in the 200 by Veronica Campbell-Brown of Jamaica, the same woman who beat her in 2004 and whom she defeated for world titles in '05 and '07. (Campbell-Brown's victory completed a Jamaican sweep of the short sprints for men and women.)

Neither American woman held back her disappointment over the individual events. "I came here to win a gold medal," said Richards.

Felix sobbed for five minutes on the shoulder of her mother, Marlean, in the belly of the stadium. "She's been looking forward to this for four years," said Felix's father, Paul. "And she had so much success along the way. It's very disappointing."