Bringing It All Back Home

Till he passed the steroid test.

We arrive at the gate outside William Knibb High near 10 p.m. It's well into chaos now: cars parked on any patch of roadside, wedged into the slimmest stretch of weeds, the streets streaming with walkers. Even though the event is hours old, a desperate thicket of faces presses to get inside.

"'Ting is free, and people still jumping the fence!" gasps one security guard, but who can blame them? It's not just the biggest party Falmouth has seen in years. It's the high school dream come true. Here's a kid, 22 years old, who left home just three years ago, and now the city, the nation, is coming back here for him: his favorite musicians, massive stars such as Shaggy, the dancehall DJs he shimmied to for years, all of them famous but none so much as he. Young and old scamper down his childhood halls and stairwells, down a hill, onto the playing field out back. Jerk-chicken smoke chuffs from half-barrel roasters. Card and domino sharps lean over tables begging the saps to play.

Now Bolt saunters onstage, wearing a black T-shirt bearing his own pointing image. He dances again, faster, more furiously than he did in the hotel—first matching a cadre of 10 men swagger for swagger, then alone with the woman dancer (green leggings, gold bra) who taught him—delighted with the scene, the music, himself. You can't imagine Tiger or Kobe letting himself go like this, not ever. The 20,000-plus Jamaicans packed onto Bolt's turf stand transfixed, screams crashing against the music.

During each pause in the action, though, Bolt does a curious thing. He will be here for hours yet, could hardly want to be anywhere else on earth. But, as at the hotel, he keeps glancing at his watch, almost nervously, the only hint of a high-strung sensibility under that preternatural calm: human after all.

"One Carl Lewis a-wonders why we so fast," a dancehall king named Tony Matterhorn growls over the loudspeakers. "I guess maybe he'll come to the islands and meet and greet the Jamaican mothers who make the greatest food in the world!"

He hands the mike to Bolt, who refuses to bite on Lewis, instead speaking only about how you should never forget your roots. Past midnight now, Bolt tries, for the first time since Beijing, to get his Olympic medals to do some good. He says, tentatively, "If you guys in the country don't act better, then people will still look down on the country...."

The crowd quiets. He's talking directly to the robbers now, the killers and the politicians who only let things get worse. "You guys try to do better," he says. "Start to look at yourself. Think before you act. Because Jamaica is a great place. People love coming here, but you have to stop the crime to let them want to come back. A lot of people say, 'I'm coming to Jamaica, but I'm wondering about the crime.' I say, Don't worry about it. Jamaica is wonderful. It's nice. The vibe is ... look at me. I enjoy myself ev-e-ry day."

Laughter rises from the audience. But Bolt keeps at it, talks about stopping violence, about the need to stay determined and how he's been beaten or injured but came back to win. "Anything you set your mind to, you can get it," he says. "So just please, people. Please understand...."

And the words float into the moist air, out over the island's young and old, and who knows if a sprinter, even this sprinter, can make one bit of difference here. Still, it's a start, and Bolt does have advantages: fame and speed and that watch on his arm. Maybe he looks at it because he likes what it tells him. He has time.