Bringing It All Back Home

Transfuse just a bit of that into Powell, and the whole country will be happy. "I talk to him," Bolt says. "He's always tense. I tell him, 'You need to chill. Just swing your arms and let it flow.' If Asafa just relaxes, he's going to be great. There's going to be some running."

Bolt glances at his watch. This is the third time in the last two minutes, but it's not a problem; what Bolt does is more interesting than what he says. We ask two more questions, and he tries to answer, but friends from Sherwood Content have driven down, and they're waiting in the pool: A late-night game of water polo calls. "It's going to be fun, going back home," he says. "It gives you a warm feeling going back to where you came from. That's when you have the most fun in your life: When you're small and carefree." Now he's rushing out the door. Within minutes Bolt is in the water, calling for the ball.

GOING HOME is complicated, though, when you are a national hero, the sudden focus of cameras and note takers. Bolt's return to Sherwood Content is no longer just a matter of one man walking up the old street to his parents' house or stopping by his aunt Lilly's bar. It entails crowds, politicians, media people dedicated to recording the event for posterity. Dozens of strangers trail him. When Bolt notices a buddy poking a long stick at the plum tree across from his boyhood stoop, he legs it across the road.

Three video guys and a photographer hustle to keep up, and somehow Bolt is able to ignore the absurdity of a world now fascinated by his most mundane moves, making the act of taking the stick himself and knocking the plums loose somehow noteworthy. Bolt is actually hungry. He shoves a handful of fruit into his mouth, wiping the juice away. When someone asks breathlessly how often he did that as a kid, Bolt looks mystified. "Every day," he says.

Earlier Bolt had come upon his primary school, its soggy front yard aswarm with fans, relatives, police and the requisite booming speaker system. He trooped through the mud—the crowd clustered and shifting about him like a swarm of bees—to give away 300 kids' backpacks, each stuffed with a T-shirt, an exercise book and pencils. His father stood beside him with Jamaica's education minister, and the prime minister's wife watched, and then Miss Royal Jamaica 2007 came in, her shoes ruined. Bolt posed for pictures.

Then there are all these family members—cousins, uncles, in-laws, 30 in all, maybe more—who flew in from London, Washington, New York City and Miami, whom Bolt greets and pretends to remember. Some of them are at Lilly's Bar when he finally arrives, but they can hardly get a word in. Lilly screams at the sight of him and engulfs him in a crushing, tear-stained hug. He goes inside, and the regulars eye him carefully, trying not to make a fuss.

But it's not so easy anymore: Bolt walks out to his private bus in the fresh damp air, and someone has flicked a switch inside Lilly's and on comes a catchy calypso beat, Jamaica's newest redemption song:

Beat your chest 'fore the finish line?

Shouldn't really make a man vexed.

Them can't believe him run so fast,