It's 1:30 a.m. and the world's fastest man is in a partying mood. Jamaican dancehall music blares from the speakers of the club, and Usain Bolt is already glistening with sweat.
Photographers press in around Bolt, who is rocketing to fame as fast as he sped along the 100-meter and 200-meter Olympic track, smashing world records.
For a moment, the photographers press a little too close. Bolt grabs the microphone and pleads: “You may be able to take some pictures but right now we just wanna dance. Give us two hours. We just ask for two hours.”
Cheers go up from the Jamaicans in the crowd, and soon Bolt is shaking and shimmying and arching back in his trademark gesture of celebration, the same kind of flamboyant move that keeps drawing reproving remarks from International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge.
But Bolt won't be tamed. While Michael Phelps won an unprecedented eight gold medals for swimming, claiming title as a top Olympian of all time, the 22-year-old Bolt takes another trophy as the iconic champion of fun, reveling in his celebrity and showing the crowd how to enjoy life.
At a news conference later Sunday, Rogge was asked again about criticism he made of Bolt's gestures and dance steps after winning the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes.
“I'll repeat what I have said: He should show more respect for his opponents. But I also said in the same way that he was a young man of 22. He has time to mature,” Rogge said.
Earlier in the week, Rogge, a patrician Belgian surgeon who once sailed yachts in the Olympic Games, suggested that Bolt's “showboating” did not display “the spirit of the Olympic ideal.” He suggested Bolt should shake hands with losing sprinters, and rebuffed Bolt's gestures after crossing the finish line. “It was perceived as ‘catch me if you can.' You don't do that.”
For his part, Bolt said flamboyant fun on the field is a part of who he is.
“I talked to the other athletes, these guys, and most of them are okay with it,” Bolt said Saturday in Beijing. “I try to enjoy myself at all times. That's how I stay relaxed. That's who I am and I won't change.”
Handball
France won the last gold medal of the Beijing Games, beating Iceland 28-23 in men's team handball to deny the small Nordic country its first gold in an Olympic event.
Nikola Karabatic scored eight goals Sunday for the French, who led 15-10 after the first half and never let Iceland come close in the second. Goalie Thierry Omeyer made nine saves in the first half to help France build its lead.
Iceland settled for the silver medal, still its best showing in any event since 1956. Spain beat Croatia 35-29 to take the bronze.
Water polo
The U.S. men's water polo claimed the silver medal after a 14-10 loss to Hungary in the gold medal match Sunday afternoon at the Yingdong Natatorium.
It is the third men's water polo silver medal for the U.S. team and the first since the Seoul 1988 Olympic Games. It also is the sixth men's medal won by the United States (silver in 1984, 1988 and 2008 and bronze in 1924, 1932 and 1972).
Doping
As of Saturday, there had been only six announced positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs, far fewer than the 30 to 40 that International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge predicted before the Games from the 10,500 athletes competing.
Some testing officials say the relatively few positive tests – given the significant advances in drug-testing technology and approaches in recent years – suggest drug use is being deterred.
Critics argue the exact opposite, that the numbers intimate more cheaters are skirting through loopholes in the testing system.
By the end of the Beijing Olympics, the IOC will have conducted about 4,500 tests. That's about 25 percent more than were performed in Athens in 2004, which resulted in 26 positive tests. Besides running the standard battery of tests for steroids and erythropoietin, officials say, athletes also have been subjected to human growth hormone tests. But to date, the HGH test, which was also used at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and Athens four years ago, has not produced a single positive.
That fact brings about the usual conundrum for anti-doping officials: Either no athletes are using HGH around the time of Olympic competition, or the test isn't very good.
About a week before the Games, the IAAF announced it had banned seven Russian athletes after a year-long investigation showed they were providing urine samples that weren't their own to testers.
Gymnastics
The investigation goes on, so does the wait, yet the IOC indicated Sunday that a reshuffling of Olympic gymnastics medals isn't likely.
Yes, this competition really was and probably will remain … one for the ages.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said paperwork appears to support what China has been saying all along: that all six members of its gold medal women's gymnastics team were old enough to compete at the Beijing Games. Gymnastics officials were still poring over the documents submitted by the Chinese in response to a request for more information on the birthdates of He Kexin, Yang Yilin, Jiang Yuyuan, Deng Linlin and Li Shanshan.
“The international federation has required the delivery of birth certificates and all the documents like family books, entries in schools and things like that,” Rogge said. “They have received the documents, and at first sight it seems to be OK.”
Boxing
For the storied Cuban boxing program, the Summer Olympics evolved into a glass half-full, glass half-empty conundrum.
Cuba finished with eight medals, most in the boxing competition, with four silver medals and four bronze.
But the team returns home with no gold medals. Not since 1968, when they made their summer games boxing debut in Mexico City, have the Cubans not produced at least one champion from any Olympics in which they've participated. (Cuba boycotted the games in 1984 and ‘88.)
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