If you like sport you live a constant battle in which romanticism and cynicism fight for the mastery. If you like athletics, that rule is multiplied by a factor of about a million. Athletics is better than any other sport in the calendar at delivering peak moments: and almost always these come at the Olympic Games.

Athletics is also more capable than any other sport of destroying such moments, as a failed drugs tests invalidates a cherished memory and at a stroke switches a favourite athlete from glorious hero to stinking villain. Athletics struggles for credibility, rather perversely because every cheat who is zealously unmasked destroys our trust. In a way, we’d rather not know.

Track and field athletics is, above all, good at stars. It took Usain Bolt substantially less than ten seconds to achieve this status, as he returned the 100 metres from the most discredited event in sport to the thing of beauty and wonder it had been in the days of innocence.

Last night he did it again with the 200 metres, winning by a crushing five metres and setting another world record into the bargain.

At the start he was joshing with the guys, as if he were a Trenchtown extra in a Bob Marley song. He loosened up with a bit of a boogie; for him, it seemed, an Olympic final was all rather a lark. He got down, bony and loose-limbed, on his mark. And then the gun went bang and he set the world on fire.

He scorched from the blocks and ran every step of the race like a man of purpose. Once you let Bolt get ahead there is no catching him, and he was ahead in the first couple of strides.

After that, it was a question of how far, and how fast. The answer to both was “very”.

It was a run of blazing, blinding brilliance: and you wished with all your might that you were witnessing the deeds of a man, a human being like me and you, rather than a creature of pharmaceutical fancy.

Bolt has the world in thrall. The extraordinary run in the 100 metres, in which he started celebrating his victory 20 metres from the line and still set a world record, is something that will stay imprinted on the memory of all who saw it. It may just be the finest bit of sport that I have ever seen, and I have seen a few, here and there.

However, we have reached a stage of cynicism in athletics when there is not a name that would surprise you if it were linked with a failed test. Then the romantic hears that suggestion and immediately shouts: “No!”

It’s not merely that I don’t believe Bolt is a drugs cheat: even more, it’s that I don’t want to believe it. I want Bolt to be real. It’s more fun that way: more meaningful.

And I think much of the world is in the same position: the imagination utterly caught by the impossibly languid nature of the fastest man in the world, revelling in the sight, the memory, the story. A failed test would rob us of all that: and more. Trust in athletics might be terminally affected if Bolt failed a test. He has lifted us so high, it’s far too far to fall.