BEIJING | How fast could he have gone? That was the question raging Saturday night in Beijing, the question raging in parts all over the world, the only question to ask after we watched Jamaica&#8217;s Usain Bolt reinvent the 100-meter dash at the Olympics.</p><p>His run was mind-boggling. Freakish. Revolutionary. Bolt ran hard for 80 meters and coasted his last seven strides, his arms stretched out by his side, and then he looked around, and slowed down for the cameras and tapped his heart, and all day he&#8217;d only eaten chicken nuggets, and his left shoe was untied, and he <em>still </em>ran the race in 9.69 seconds, which is longer than it probably took you to read this run-on sentence and also just so happens to be the fastest time in this history of the entire world.</p><p>How fast? One coach said he could have run it in 9.6 flat.</p><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not worried about world records,&#8221; Bolt said.</p><p>How fast? The whispers were that he could have run it in 9.55.</p><p>&#8220;I only race to win,&#8221; Bolt said.</p><p>How fast? He beat Richard Thompson by .2 seconds, which was the biggest gap between first and second in an Olympic 100 meters since Carl Lewis ran away from fellow American Sam Graddy in 1984. The difference is that Bolt was very apparently not even trying at the end.</p><p>&#8220;I could see him slowing down, and I was still pumping to the line,&#8221; Thompson said.</p><p>There has never been anything at the Olympics quite like this guy, never anyone who ran so fast while seeming to exert so little. Bolt seemed to put more energy into the dances he did before and after the race than he did in the race. He seemed so unconcerned about his time that, he insisted, he did not even know he had set the world record until after he had taken a victory lap. Then, once he realized that he had set it, he graciously posed in front of the electronic scoreboard for photographers.</p><p>How fast could he have gone? The question reveals the wonder of Usain Bolt. Anything&#8217;s possible. He burst on the scene only about a year ago, when he begged his coach to let him run the most glamorous race, the 100-meter dash. Bolt&#8217;s event had been 200 meters. The coach relented. Less than a year later, in May, Bolt ran the second-fastest 100-meter time ever. Four weeks later, in New York, he ran the fastest.</p><p>That&#8217;s when all the other sprinters first realized that they might be dealing with something entirely new, a 6-foot-5 sprinting prodigy from another planet. The fastest men in the world were often tall &#8212; Carl Lewis, for instance, was 6-2 &#8212; but Bolt was the first one tall enough to play small forward on a basketball team. He was not a naturally great starter because it took a little longer to unfold his big frame, but he had such long strides, and he brought such a force of energy to his runs that he moved and chased like some sprinting Terminator coming back from the future.</p><p>The first time I saw him run live was Friday evening in a 100-meter preliminary, and it was entirely different from anything I had ever seen. Bolt danced around happily before the race. For years now, we have watched the former fastest man in the world Maurice Greene walk with intensity before his race, as if he were surveying the ground, as if he were visualizing every step of his race, as if he were preparing for his SAT.</p><p>Now here was this tall, gangling guy from Jamaica looking around and laughing and pointing at people, as if he were getting ready to give the best man&#8217;s speech at the wedding. The gun sounded, Bolt broke with the pack, then he pulled ahead, then he pulled way ahead, and then he cut off the engines. It happened that fast. Bolt slowed down to the point where it really looked as if he would run the last 15 meters or so backward. He could have done that and still won the race. He crossed in 9.92 &#8212; a time fast enough to make him a legit medal contender &#8212; and this was running half a race.