Simon Barnes's Olympic blog

What would he do this time? That was the question that obsessed the world as a 6ft 5in Jamaican slouched towards history. Would he dance all the way? Would he gurn and showboat? Would he remember to tie his shoelace this time? One thing we did know was that he would be fast, but how fast? How fast could he go if, this time, he actually tried every step of the way?

Usain Bolt captured the imagination of the world with his utterly sensational run in the 100metres final on Saturday, victory, gold medal, world record and all. And all the time, he told us that the 200metres was his real event, much as Michelangelo told us he was really a poet.

So yesterday he ran in the final of the 200metres. At the start he was joshing with the guys, as if he were a Trenchtown extra in a Bob Marley song. He loosened up with a bit of a boogie; for him, it seemed, an Olympic final was all rather a lark. He got down, bony and loose-limbed, on his mark. And then the gun went bang and he set the world on fire.

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He scorched from the blocks and ran every yard of the race like a man of purpose. Once you let Bolt get ahead there is no catching him, and he was ahead in the first couple of strides. After that, it was a question of how far, and how fast. The answer to both was very.

He won by a good five metres, and stopped the clock at 19.30sec. He beat Michael Johnson's world record, something I saw Johnson set at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and that was so perfect a run I doubted if I would see it beaten. But Bolt went beyond perfection, taking history and the occasion and the expectation all in his giant, infinitely elastic stride.

There are times in sport when you wonder if you don't spend rather too much of your life bothering with it, and then again, there are moments when you know beyond all doubt that sport can be as marvellous a thing as we humans are capable of coming up with. That's if you think that joy and aspiration and the pursuit and capture of excellence are marvellous things.

Bolt has lit up the Games and rekindled the world's joy in his sport and in the sad and discredited sprinting events. He has allowed us to find a real and simple delight in the sight of an extraordinary man performing extraordinary deeds. I long to see him run again, I long still more for his retirement. It can't come soon enough, to be frank. I really don't think I can bear the is-he-isn't-he tension that the rest of his career will involve. I don't want to be deprived of the memory of two of the great races I - and anyone else - has ever seen.