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Fast show: Usain Bolt won in Paris despite making an 'awful' start Photo: REUTERSWhile Tiger Woods was battling the gales on Friday evening, the man who has replaced him as sport's most sought-after icon was casually pulling off his tracksuit and flicking out those million-dollar legs at the starting line in Paris.
There was not a sound to be heard in the Stade de France. Barely a cough or a sneeze. The silence was heavy with anticipation, to the point where time almost seemed to slow down. This feeling has been known to infect his rivals, who can wake up and find themselves still in the blocks as the great man disappears into the distance.
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Finally, the gunshot rang out and the athletes drove away from the line. For once, it was Bolt who reacted slowest. At the 40-metre mark, this 6ft 5in giant of a sprinter was looking down on his fellow competitors, but hardly looking back at them.
Still, even when Bolt is off key, he can always fall back on the greatest gift nature has given to any athlete: his unique, and unprecedented, three-metre stride. As the line approached, he stretched out ahead of his fellow Jamaicans, Asafa Powell and the young up-and-comer Yohan Blake, to take the tape in 9.84sec.
Truly, this is a golden age for sprinting. Just six years ago, a time of 9.84 would have been good enough to win the gold medal at the Athens Olympics.
Now it is a middle-of-the-road sort of time, a ho-hum sort of time. A time that has Bolt describing his first 40 metres as "awful". Even when he is awful, he is still awfully fast.
"I was awful in the first half of the race, so I had to work a little bit harder to win," he explained later. "It's all about determination, because I want to be the best, and I want to stay on top. I'm happy – I escaped injury and I won."
For all Bolt's virtuosity, he knows that he cannot afford to ease off the pace for an instant. Far from being a one-man show, the men's 100-metres is a sort of high-speed love triangle.
There are two other athletes, both potential world-beaters, and both admirers of Bolt's, who can seriously challenge him. They are Powell, who has run under 9.80 no fewer than SEVEN times, and Tyson Gay, who clocked 9.71 in Berlin last summer even though he was nursing a groin problem.
The competition is so hot that Bolt's long unbeaten sequence – which now stands at 14 successive finals and could reach two years in September – is coming under pressure every time he arrives at a meet.
"I don't pick one person out and say 'he will be hard to beat' because you never know who will pop up," Bolt said. "This guy from Paris, I can never pronounce his name – is it [Christophe] Lemaitre?
"He came out of nowhere and he ran 9.98, so you can never know who is going to show up on the day. I focus on everybody in the race and I take them all seriously, whether it's Asafa or Tyson or everybody else.
"These guys are good. I train with them all the time so I know how good. Over time, with work and focus, they're only going to get better. I know these guys are coming up and so I keep my eyes on them."
Bolt now says he will spend the next couple of weeks in Jamaica, working on his conditioning and his ongoing recovery from an Achilles tendon injury.
For the moment, his medical advisers are recommending that he should stay away from running the 200 or the 400, because cornering puts more strain on the area. But he promises that when he returns to action – either in Stockholm on Aug 6 or in Zurich on Aug 19 – he will have the upper-body strength to nail that "drive phase" in the first half of the 100m.
For British fans, the disappointment is that Bolt will be absent from the London Grand Prix, which sits in between those two European meetings on Aug 13-14.
Here we are, in the middle of one of the great sporting rivalries of our times, and yet the complexities of British tax law mean that Bolt could face a massive bill if he decides to race competitively on these shores.
Asked on Friday night whether he thought he would run again in Britain before the 2012 Olympics, Bolt said he did not know. But he did express regret at skipping Crystal Palace – a venue where he has performed every year since turning professional in 2004.
"There are so many Jamaicans in London," he said, "and they come to Crystal Palace every year to support me, so I'm deeply disappointed. But this is my job."
The inspirational effect of Usain Bolt's presence could be felt all week in Paris. On Thursday, he was the star turn at a street party held in honour of the city's Jamaican element.
Cheered on by 2000 revellers, who packed the square in front of the Hotel de Ville, Bolt turned DJ and span a bunch of Bob Marley tunes. "I really tore it up in that DJ set," he laughed, "next year I'm going to come back and do it again."
And then there was the fancy purple shirt, specially designed for Friday's race, which looked like it shared a common ancestry with John Daly's outrageous trousers from the Open.
"I've started my own clothing line,"Bolt added, "and we're working on some more stuff because I'm the cool one."
One can only hope that Jeremy Hunt and Hugh Robertson, the key people at the Departure of Culture, Media and Sport, find a way of smoothing out this ludicrous tax wrinkle.
Here in Bolt-free Britain, we are in danger of missing all the fun.
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