WaybackWire

BEIJING, Wednesday.—Usain Bolt won the Olympic 200m tonight in a world record 19.30sec, adding the title to his 100m crown for the first sprint double since Carl Lewis in 1984.

The Jamaican took 0.02sec off Michael Johnson’s 19.32, set at the Atlanta Games in 1996 and unbeaten for 12 years. He won by more than half a second and cut 0.37sec from his own best of 19.67.

Johnson had seen it coming. “I will be able to kiss my record goodbye,” the former record holder said before the race.

“I’m shocked, I am still shocked,” Bolt said afterwards. “I have been aspiring to the world record for so long. It is a dream come true.”

Shawn Crawford took silver in 19.96 and Walter Dix bronze in 19.98 after Churandy Martina and Wallace Spearmon were disqualified.

Online, the reaction was swift. On Reddit, the user who opened a thread on the record had a simple verdict: “He’s an alien!”

At home the mood was just as high. “Jamaica has a new sensation,” Jermaine Simms, a reader from Clarendon, wrote in a letter to the Gleaner on Thursday.

BEIJING, Wednesday.—Wrestler Sushil Kumar won bronze in the 66kg freestyle today, and boxer Vijender Kumar made sure of another medal for India.

Sushil, 25, lost his first bout of the morning to Ukraine’s Andriy Stadnik. When Stadnik reached the final, the Indian got a second chance through the repechage. He won three repechage bouts on his way to bronze, beating Leonid Spiridonov of Kazakhstan 3-2 in the bronze medal bout.

“I thought I could have won the bout in the morning, but luck was later with me as the Ukraine wrestler reached the final and I got into the Repechage,” he said.

The same day Vijender beat Carlos Gongora of Ecuador in the 75kg middleweight quarter-final to reach the semi-finals, making him the first Indian to win an Olympic boxing medal. “My height and my right punch worked wonders for me,” he said.

Sports Minister M.S. Gill was full of praise. “He has the technique and he fights with his brain and not with his fist,” he said.

In Vijender’s home village of Kaluwas, in Bhiwani, the women of the household watched the bout in one room while the men gathered at a television outside. Youths from the Bhiwani Boxing Club arrived with sweets.

With Abhinav Bindra’s gold from the first week, that makes three medals at one Games, which the Tribune’s front page called the first time ever for India.

On Friday the bronze was Vijender’s. “Your single minded devotion to excellence in your chosen field of sport has resulted in this achievement which makes the entire nation proud,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told him in a message.

BEIJING, Monday.—Liu Xiang, China’s biggest star and the defending Olympic champion, pulled out of the 110m hurdles today, limping away from the blocks in his heat before walking into the tunnel.

His coach, Sun Haiping, blamed an injury to Liu’s right foot. The official athletics television coverage was halted so that a press conference could be held.

“We worked hard every day, but the result was as you see, and it’s really hard to take,” Sun said.

In the city the verdict was short. “It’s a shame,” said Wu Fan, a Beijing resident.

China was top of the medal table that day. “We have started to dream that China could surpass the sporting hegemony of the United States and become world number one in the number of gold medals,” the Beijing Morning Post wrote in a front-page commentary.

By Sunday night that dream had come true, even without the man known as the “Shanghai Express”.

BEIJING, Monday.—Questions are being asked about the ages of two of China’s gymnasts, He Kexin and Yang Yilin, amid claims that they are under the minimum age.

Records found online give He’s age as 13 in 2007 and 14 in May 2008.

The International Gymnastics Federation says it acted as soon as the claims surfaced. “We heard these rumours and we immediately wrote to the Chinese gymnastics federation,” said its secretary-general, Andre Gueisbuhler.

Later in the week Mike Walker, a 33-year-old computer security consultant, said he had found a record of He’s birth on a spreadsheet of China’s General Administration of Sport.