World Athletics Championships: To Usain Bolt, all things are now possible

Berlin was agog, left fevered by the way Bolt had again refashioned the human speed barrier in 9.58sec. Could he break the world 100 metres record again before the season was out? And be the first man under 9.5sec? Could he break the 200m record of 19.30sec again at these world championships on Thursday too?

But then there were also the doubters, seasoned observers still feeling bitten by the likes of Ben Johnson and Marion Jones, who were left asking "how could we believe in what we saw?"

That's what athletic miracles do today. They bring as much suspicion as awe, as much scepticism as joy. Yet, while Bolt was being hailed by the head of world athletics Lamine Diack as the greatest athlete of all time, the subject of all the frenzy, last seen being pursued by screaming fans down Jesse-Owens-Allee outside the stadium, just ignored it all.

Bolt turned down the chance to party, settling instead for a day of rest – and, naturally, of more chicken McNuggets – before the start of his 200m quest today. He knew the rest of athletics was consumed with speculation about how much faster he can run so he threw us an old bone: "I think it will stop at 9.4 but you never know..."

It is the "you never know" bit which he knows tantalises us. Yesterday, the biomechanical analysts from the IAAF produced a statistical breakdown of the final which suggested that what we saw in Sunday was Bolt's Bob Beamon moment, a barrier-shattering, never-to-be repeated annihilation of the sport's blue riband record. But you never know...

Eleven hundredths of a second slashed off the mark in one hit was sprinting's equivalent of the moment in Mexico City in 1968 when long jumper Beamon decided to bypass the 28ft barrier altogether as he took the world record to 29ft 2½in with one leap.

But the IAAF's split times confirmed that Bolt's astounding improvement on the 9.69sec record he had set exactly a year earlier in Beijing was due almost entirely to the fact that this time he did not showboat over the last few of his 41½ strides as he had done in China.

He was actually slower over the first 20m than in Beijing (2.89sec to 2.87sec) but what made the vast difference was his lack of concentration as he covered the final 40m in Beijing in 3.37sec. On Sunday, in contrast, he covered the equivalent stretch in 3.27sec, a whole tenth of a second quicker. Between 60m and 80m, he topped 46kph (28.58mph).

There was one quick look right and a glance left towards the clock, so perhaps he could even have gone a fraction quicker but, realistically, there looks to be no section of the race where he can in future trim off more than the odd hundredth of a second at a time. He has just made those $100,000 (£60,700) world-record bonuses hellishly difficult to annex now.

His coach Glen Mills has talked ultimately about 9.52sec being possible but, even for Bolt, sub-9.5 may be asking too much. Yet that's the glory of the man. He can make any prediction seem foolhardy because, as he says: "I don't think limits". That's why he has now taken 0.16sec in just 15 months off a record which had fallen only 0.21sec in the previous 39 years.

He sees no limits. Think of this: on a rain-soaked day in Manchester earlier this year he clocked 8.72sec for the last rolling 100m on a 150m straight; he lost key weeks of training after his car accident and minor foot surgery in April; and he may well have only been only 85 per cent fit on Sunday. What is possible once he is really back to his Beijing sleekest?

Yet not unreasonably, given the event's association with doping, nothing Bolt does now will ever convince some. Perhaps the US columnist who declared: "I hope Bolt is clean, but after a while, we only hope, we don't believe" was in Rome in 1987 to witness the last time the record was broken by a tenth of a second. By one Ben Johnson.

I was in the Olympic Stadium that night, feeling probably even more incredulous exhilaration than Bolt's heroics induced on Sunday. How easy it is to feel cheated; those who chronicle athletics have to steel themselves for betrayal.

Yet athletics has to believe in Bolt. In the unique gifts of a kid who was a world-beater even at 15. In the genius who makes it all look so natural and simple. In the man being asked to carry a sport's fortunes like none before him.

"The competition between me, Tyson [Gay] and Asafa [Powell] is making the sport big again," he beamed proudly. Except he had got it wrong. There is no competition; there is just planet Bolt and anything is possible there.