Now he is a creature that inspires awe. That arm-span, that extraordinary ability to flush out lactic acid, that hard work, that informed instinct that gave him the extra stroke to take his seventh gold (100m butterfly) by 0.01 of a second. (And those 12,000 calories he must consume each day.)

Can anybody compare with his eight golds and the way he won them, from history or the present?

Usain Bolt, for instance. Purists argue that his three golds, all in record-breaking times — in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay — don’t test enough of the width of ability in athletics that Phelps’s eight did in swimming.

But you had to be at the Bird’s Nest last Saturday night. You had to be sitting at ground level at the finish line, as we were lucky enough to have done, to feel the way he stretched time in that 100m stretch. You had to have felt first-hand the way in which he then connected with every spectator, to know he had made each one of them suddenly aware of the potential of self-improvement of the human race.

And given the disgrace that’s come to 100m with a recent history of doping, Bolt’s run intrigued. It had the potential to either redeem or destroy sprints for the foreseeable future.

So, aren’t those records special?

Then to India. India has never before known how it feels to own an individual gold. It’s been a stranger to multi-sport victory. Now, it has three, a gold and two bronzes. Three does not weigh too much in the great haul of nations. But against a history of nothingness and accidental victories, does three not signal a reversal? How much weight accrues from that?

... contd.