Rio 2016: It's only a heat, but the world still rushes to watch Bolt

RIO DE JANEIRO

: When an entire stadium puts everything away for later, without being told, as if by some automated turn of the key, you know that special things are about to unfold.

The silence that descends, you can almost touch it. Somebody shushes loudly, just for effect. You can hear a baby wail in the crowd, so clear in the silence. Everyone's peering into the distance at the nine men crouching in their start blocks. The warm Rio sun almost saturates the distant figures. You have to really squint to see.

The start gun echoes in the quiet swirl of the stadium. Despite you preparing for it, its report can still startle you. Perhaps that is its job -to be the trigger. The baby wails louder but it is instantly drowned as a wall of noise rises, and rises. To think the man is only just about breaking out into a jog down there.

"I'm feeling good. I'm happy," he said later, making a whole horde of listeners leave

Justin Gatlin

and gravitate towards him. "As I said, I've got the first one out of the way so I'm happy about that. So now it's all about execution and getting it right when it comes to the finals." Watching Usain Bolt is like preparing for a very short flight you still have to g hurriedly report an hour or more earlier.

In his first appearance at t the Rio Olympics here - a confirmation of the fact that he's here, and means business - it took him all of 10.07 seconds: a stroll, more sweat a broken in the warm-up area than at the actual heat. But the entire run-up to it was a race of its own making s -a bus driver who chooses to s stop at every traffic light, the Olympic-pin laden guy ahead f of you failing the metal detector a half-dozen times, a stadium lift that's just too slow and pokemon-hunting amblers h who just won't give way. The man will come and go, and you're not even halfway there yet. And it's not even that you're running late. Usain Bolt makes the world rush to him. But maybe it was worth it, because when it happened, there was a perceptible, collective sigh. It made you turn to the grim-faced stranger seated next to you, peering into his work laptop. He who looked back and exchanged a smile. Probably everyone at the stadium did -they turned to each other with that look, that everything's going to be fine now. Hey, it was just a 100m heat, but it was the much-needed prelude to assuage a waiting world that sport's most exciting star was just starting to warm up.

The man himself seemed subdued, almost happy to be all coiled up inside. It took some coaxing by the cameras and egging on by the crowd for him to actually do some show-boating, but it didn't seem as if he was into it.

"It wasn't the best start. I felt kind of slow," he would explain later. "I'm not used to running this early at any championship," he said in his heavy Jamaican voice. Thank god for small mercies. "Hopefully tomorrow I'll come out and I'll feel much better, much smoother." You do that, Usain Bolt, we'll join you there.