RIO DE JANEIRO
: You actually put everything away, push things back for later. When an entire stadium does that, without being told, as if by some automated turn of the key, you know that special things will unfold.
The silence that descends, you can almost touch it and tick it away. Somebody shushes loudly, just for effect. You can hear a baby wail in the crowd, so clear in the silence that you can actually see where it's coming from. Someone shushes again, it's funny, but no one laughs. Everyone's peering into the distance at the nine men crouching at their start blocks. The warm Rio sun almost saturates the distant figures out of view, 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's 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 something like preparing for flight that's say, a teeny weeny 30-minute one - you still got to hurriedly report an hour or more earlier. His first appearance at the
Rio Olympics here - a confirmation of the fact that he's here, and means business -- it took him all of 10.07 seconds on Saturday, a stroll, more sweat 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, everyone's own private Olympics for a hugely public spectacle -- a bus driver who chooses to stop at every traffic light, the Olympic-pin laden guy ahead of you failing the metal detector a half-dozen times, a stadium lift that's just the opposite of what the venue is to showcase, speed, and pokemon-hunting amblers 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, who looked back, and exchange a smile. Probably everyone at the stadium did that - 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 and not betraying it. It took some coaxing by the camera and egging 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 go on, Usain Bolt, we'll join you there…
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