BEIJING — Usain Bolt loves the cameras, the cameras love Usain Bolt, and when they connected during his third victory lap of these Olympics, he smiled that infectious smile and raised three fingers.
As in: 3-for-3-for-3.
As in: three events, three gold medals, three world records.
Bolt capped his spectacular Summer Games by tearing through his portion of the 400-meter relay Friday night, setting up Jamaica’s victory in 37.10 seconds to break a 16-year-old world record.
It was the perfect way to end a weeklong coming-out party that began with a world record of 9.69 in the 100 meters last Saturday, followed by a world record of 19.30 in the 200 meters Wednesday.
“The greatest Olympics ever,” Bolt called it.
Who could argue?
Bolt joins quite a list: The only other men to win gold medals in the 100, 200 and the sprint relay at one Olympics were Carl Lewis in 1984, Bobby Morrow in 1956 and Jesse Owens in 1936.
None of those greats set world records in either the 100 or 200, though, much less both.
“People can only dream of doing what he’s done. He’s basically cemented himself as a legend of track and field,” said Bolt’s relay teammate Michael Frater. “I don’t think any performance can top what he’s done here.”
If not for Michael Phelps, the Beijing Games would go down in history as the Bolt Games.
Impossible as it might have seemed after Phelps collected his Olympics-record eight golds in the pool, the 6-foot-5 sprinter managed to share top billing thanks to speed that stuns and charisma that gets people talking.
And while there was drama at the Water Cube — one of Phelps’ golds came by a hundredth of a second, another came thanks to a relay teammate’s huge comeback — Bolt left no room for doubt in any of his three events at the Bird’s Nest.
He won the 100 by 0.20, then the 200 by 0.66. The margin in the relay, 0.96 over second-place Trinidad and Tobago, was the biggest in that event at the Olympics since 1936. Japan was third.
“We simply couldn’t compete,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Marc Burns said.
The Jamaicans shattered the old mark of 37.40, originally set by a U.S. team that included Lewis at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, then matched by another American quartet in 1993.
With that latest gold and world record secured, Bolt went into his now-familiar postrace routine. He yanked off his golden spikes and did a barefoot dance. He pointed his fingers to the sky, pantomiming an archer’s stance.
This time, though, thrilled to be part of a team effort, he added a new wrinkle, chest-bumping Powell, the man who held the 100 record for three years until this kid came along. It was Powell’s first Olympic medal.
“I said to Asafa, ‘Can we do this?’” Bolt recounted, “and he was like, ‘Don’t worry, mon, we got this one.’”
In other medal events, Tirunesh Dibaba of Ethiopia won the women’s 5,000 in 15 minutes, 41.40 seconds, more than 1½ minutes slower than her world record, to add that gold to the one she earned in the 10,000; Steve Hooker won Australia’s first track gold medal of these Summer Games and cleared an Olympic-record 19 feet, 6¾ inches (5.96 meters) in the pole vault; and Maurren Higa Maggi of Brazil leaped 23 feet, 1¼ inches (7.04 meters) on her first attempt to beat defending Olympic champion Tatyana Lebedeva of Russia by a half-inch in the women’s long jump.
The long jump bronze went to Blessing Okagbare of Nigeria.

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