Rio 2016: Usain Bolt's Last Hurrah?

Going into the RIO Olympics, Usain Bolt remains the man to beat - and he know it.

- Mlick Brown

The track – although you could hardly call it that – where, as a young pupil at the Waldensia Primary School, Usain Bolt first stretched his legs as a runner is a ragged and bumpy patch of grass, a step away from the single-track road leading to the village of Sherwood Content. Somebody has marked out four black lines in the grass to serve as lanes, which peter out into a thicket of palm trees. ‘Yeah, that’s where it all started for me,’ Bolt says, when I tell him I was there the previous day. ‘That’s where we had our sports day, and it was really small.’ And can you remember what you were thinking as you ran there? ‘

I was thinking about winning.’

Usain Bolt has a way of talking that sounds like a smile – soft, mellifluous and lilting, with a musical laugh that seems always to be waiting to make itself heard. He is 6ft 5in, lean, muscular, like polished mahogany – beautiful – and he comes into the room of the Kingston hotel where we meet with the loose-limbed grace of a gazelle, seeming not so much to walk as to flow like mercury. He is dressed in track trousers, a T-shirt, Puma shoes, and he is wearing a very large and very expensive Hublot wristwatch – one of his many sponsors – which he will later ensure is in view when he poses for photographs.