BEIJING – There are things I never expected to see in my lifetime. I never expected to see anyone win eight gold medals in a single Olympics. I never expected to see a jukebox the size of an iPod. I never expected to see a man hit more than 70 home runs in a season. I never expected to see yet another Batman movie sweep America.

More than any of that, though, I never expected to see a human being run faster than Michael Johnson did under a snowstorm of camera flashes on a muggy August night in Atlanta a dozen years ago.

It happened. Wednesday night in Beijing, more than 12 years and 7,000 miles away from that moment in Atlanta, Usain Bolt left behind the world’s fastest men. He burst into the lead of a stunning 200-meters race when coming out of the turn, and he ran alone the last 30 meters. Only he was not alone. Bolt kept glancing over at the timer to the left of the finish line. Like he was racing a ghost.

When he leaned across the line, he saw 19.31 – one hundredth of a second faster than Johnson’s unbeatable time – and he punched the air with his right arm. Then he fell to his knees and stretched out on the track. While he was doing that the official world-record time dropped to 19.30. Usain Bolt is that fast. His time even drops when he’s lying down.

The history: Bolt became the first man since Carl Lewis in the boycotted Games of 1984 to win the 100 and 200 meters in the same Olympics. More to the point, though, he became the first man to complete the double AND set world records in both events. Ever. He won the gold and set the world-record time of 9.69 n the 100-meter dash on Saturday.

“I blew my mind and I blew the world’s mind,” he told reporters.

True. He also talked Wednesday about how much it meant to break the world record, which at first glance might sound funny because just a few days earlier, after he set the world record in the 100, he said precisely the opposite. He said world records really don’t mean anything to him. But, if you look deeper you see: He was not trying to beat a world record on Thursday. No. He was trying to beat the echo of Michael Johnson.

The idea of beating Michael Johnson seemed unimaginable to those of us who were there in Centennial Olympic Park in 1996 when Johnson ran his 200. You might remember, that was a crazy Olympics. Busses were late. Volunteers would disappear. A bomb went off in Centennial Park. People griped constantly. Commercialism and Coca Cola overran those Games, too, in a whole new way. There were great moments too – Muhammad Ali’s shaky hands lit the torch, gymnast Kerri Strug landed on one leg, Carl Lewis won his fourth long jump – but those Olympics lacked a seminal moment, something that left people gasping for air.

Then on a Thursday night, with the Olympics winding down, Johnson crouched in the blocks and released at the gun. Johnson was such a beautiful runner – he ran straight up, as if he was trying to run and look over a tall person in front of him at the same time. He headed into the turn and it was apparent that he had the lead. Then, suddenly, he just hurtled forward. There’s no way to know where that sort of jolt of speed comes from. From the stands it looked like an optical illusion, like we had all put on 3D glasses at precisely the same time.

Johnson would describe that instant beautifully. He said it was like rushing down a steep hill in a soap box derby car; you know that you’re going way too fast but you can’t quite stop. Really, you don’t even want to stop. Johnson left them all standing, and when he crossed the line two huge steps ahead of Namibia’s Frank Federicks, the crowd erupted in what sounded like the loudest cheer of the Olympics. A few seconds later, when the electronic time showed the crowd the impossible-to-believe time of 19.32, those fans somehow cheered louder.

At that precise moment I turned to someone and said, “I do not think we will ever see a man run faster than that.” That feeling was so present in the moment, in that stadium, I would bet almost everyone felt something similar. Later we would find out that Johnson reached a top speed of about 25 mph. Later we would notice that for 12 long years afterward, nobody came within three-tenths of a second of Johnson’s time. But we didn’t need to know that then. At that time, in that moment, we knew what our instincts told us: The guy had reached top speed.

Things change. At these Olympics, Usain Bolt emerged, a whole new kind of sprinter, a 6-foot-5 Jamaican seemingly without a care in the world. During the 100-meter dash on Saturday, he ran his world record, and it appeared he ran it almost without trying, with one shoe untied, with a jog to the finish. Writers around the world felt compelled to at least broach the subject of performance-enhancing drugs, mostly because what Bolt did in the 100 seemed unnatural or supernatural or preternatural … anyway, not natural.

Then came Wednesday’s race, and Bolt came with a different attitude. He did not just want to win the gold medal. He wanted the record. He wanted history. He wanted Michael Johnson. After a sluggish start, facing a light headwind, he looked like Johnson. He burst into the clear. All eyes watched to see just how hard Bolt would run at the end with the race already won. He kept running. And looking at the timer. And running. And looking at the timer. Sure, he seemed to be timing his finish so that he would JUST beat Johnson’s record. Then he did it, breaking the record by two-hundredths. But he could not possibly have done that on purpose, right? Nobody’s that good.

All the while the fans took pictures and cheered madly. It’s amazing how much a crowd of 91,000 mostly Chinese fans in Beijing sounded almost exactly like a crowd of 85,000 mostly American fans in Atlanta. Then maybe it’s not amazing at all. Maybe that’s just the sound of wonder.

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(c) 2008, The Kansas City Star.

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AP-NY-08-20-08 1619EDT