Bolt Is First to Repeat as Winner of 100 and 200 Meters

LONDON — Usain Bolt is an all-but-impossible track and field act to follow.

So on Thursday night, with the stadium full and the London weather just right, David Rudisha took full advantage of performing first.

There were no pacemakers in this Olympic 800-meter race, so Rudisha, the Kenyan star, set his own torrid pace: 49.28 seconds for 400 meters, 1 minute 14.30 seconds for 600, with the stadium announcer’s voice rising with anticipation. And in the final curve and final straightaway, Rudisha finished the job, along with his own world record, crossing the line with his wide eyes fixed firmly on the digital clock as it flashed “1:40.91.”

“Nobody has done the world record in the 800 without pace setting,” Rudisha said. “I thought it was going to be difficult. I knew I could run 1:41 but breaking the world record was a different story. But I was very determined, and I knew I was in good shape this year.”

With the crowd and the wider world bracing for something extraordinary from Bolt in an hour or so, Rudisha had beaten him to it, but Bolt did not fade quietly into the night.

After looking vulnerable in the Jamaican trials, losing both sprints to Yohan Blake, Bolt has looked much more familiar here. He defended his Olympic title by beating Blake in the 100-meter dash on Sunday, and on Thursday he did the same in the 200, emerging from the bend with a four-meter lead and then losing some ground to Blake in the next 80 meters but never losing control of the race.

Bolt won slowing down in his final four strides in a time of 19.32 seconds, and he crossed the line with his head turned to keep a firm gaze on Blake. He won it with an index finger pressed to his lips.

“For me, that was for all the doubters,” Bolt said. “That was for all the people that were saying I wasn’t going to win, that I wasn’t going to make myself a legend, that was just for them to say, ‘You can stop talking now. I’m a living legend.’ ”

Bolt become the first sprinter in history to win the 100 and the 200 in consecutive Olympics, though he conceded that his back was a concern coming out of the curve on Thursday, and though his winning time in the 200 was not quite as fast as his 19.30 in Beijing.

Achieving legendary status has been Bolt’s mantra since he grabbed the second week of the 2008 Olympics by the lapels and gave it shake after shake: winning three gold medals, all in world-record time, and bringing his pre-race and post-race antics to a global audience.

Chasing history clearly proved to be a fine motivational tool for the Jamaican sprinter who already had everything. It carried him to new world records and titles in the 100 and 200 at the world championships in Berlin in 2009, but to rise again in London, he said, he needed the jolt provided by his younger training partner, Blake.

Blake won the 100-meter world title last year after Bolt was disqualified because of a false start and beat Bolt in the 100 and 200 in the Jamaican trials.

“Blake did give me a wake-up call at the trials,” Bolt said. “He kind of just knocked on my door and said, ‘Usain, this is the Olympic year. You have to get serious. You have to remember I’m here, and I’m ready to go.’ ”

Blake, as it turned out, was ready for nothing more than silver, finishing in 19.44 seconds on Thursday as Jamaica ended up with a 200 sweep. Warren Weir, a former hurdler, took the bronze medal in a personal best time of 19.84.

“It is Usain’s time; he has been working hard both on and off the track,” Blake said. “It’s his moment.”

Bolt characteristically made ample use of the moment: prancing, posing, borrowing a photographer’s camera to snap photographs of Blake, kissing the new, fast track. Track and field should consider kissing him back, because he has given the sport the global figure that it sorely needed in 2008 in a Darwinian entertainment landscape.

In his generally lighthearted post-race news conference, the focus was more on what he might do next.

“After this Olympics, I’m a legend now,” Bolt said. “I don’t know what I really want to do, if I’m still going to run the 100 or 200 or try something else.”

Weir, sitting next to him, piped up with a suggestion, which Bolt rejected: the Jamaican bobsled team.

But the news conference also had serious moments, as when Bolt was asked to compare himself with great sprinters past like Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis.

Bolt gave full marks to Owens, the American who won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. But he lashed out at Lewis, the American who won nine gold medals over four Games from 1984 to 1996.

“I’m going to say something controversial right now,” Bolt said. “Carl Lewis, I have no respect for him. The things he says about the track athletes is really downgrading for another athlete to be saying something like that about other athletes. I think he’s just looking attentions really because nobody really talks much about him.”

Lewis has been critical in the past of Jamaica’s antidoping efforts, and in 2008, he said: “When people ask me about Bolt I say he could be the greatest athlete of all time. But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don’t question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you’re a fool. Period.”

Bolt said: “That was really sad for me when I heard the other day what he was saying, so for me it was upsetting. It was all about drugs, talking about drugs, drug stuff. For me, for an athlete to be out of the sport and to be saying that, that’s really upsetting for me.”

Though the 200 belonged to Jamaica, with Wallace Spearmon of the United States finishing fourth, it was still another triumphant night for the United States. The team won two more gold medals and two more silver medals, finishing 1-2 in the decathlon and the men’s triple jump.

Ashton Eaton won the decathlon with Trey Hardee, a two-time world champion, placing second.

In the triple jump, Christian Taylor won with a season’s best effort of 17.81 meters, and his close friend Will Claye finishing second with a jump of 17.62.

Taylor won the world championship last year, with Claye taking bronze. But Claye has been busier in London: He also won a bronze medal in the men’s long jump, which made him the first American since 1904 to win medals in both horizontal jumps. His and Taylor’s success are part of a wider American renaissance in the jumping events, with Brittney Reese winning the women’s long jump and Chanute Lowe one of the favorites in the women’s high jump.

“I feel we don’t get the recognition we deserve,” Claye said. “I feel like Christian and I are bringing more attention back to the jumps.”

But Thursday, from start to finish, was a difficult day to make a deep impression in the Olympic Stadium.

There were too many stories, too many angles, beginning with the morning session when Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee who runs on carbon fiber blades, and his South African teammates were unable to finish their first-round heat in the 4x400 meter relay after a collision on the second leg did not allow Pistorius to even run his third leg. Officials eventually reinstated the South African team for Friday’s final, citing obstruction.

Even those who did finish the race had their struggles. The American sprinter Manteo Mitchell ran the first leg for the United States’s 4x400 team in the first round, felt something snap in his left leg but completed his section of the race, only to discover later that he had broken his fibula.

The United States team qualified for the final, and the Americans, with 24 track-and-field medals, have a fine chance of reaching their target of 30.

But for now the only athlete to set a world record on the track at this meet is not American and not Bolt.

It is Rudisha, the 23-year-old Masai, who broke his own mark of 1:41.01 set in Italy in 2010. His father, Daniel Rudisha, won a silver medal in the 4x400 in 1968. Now the son has a gold — if not the same renown as Bolt.

“I know people love Bolt, and there’s a lot of fans, many fans out there watching him,” Rudisha said. “I knew if I could do something special also, even breaking the Olympic record, it would be great for me. I’m happy and happy for him.”