ATHENS, Greece - If you live for the men’s 100 meters and figure that once it’s over, the rest of the Olympic track meet is just a lot of people from places you couldn’t find on a map with names that even Demosthenes couldn’t pronounce running around in circles, you got what you wanted Sunday.

This wasn’t just the overall fastest Olympic 100 in history — the first time five men broke 10 seconds. It also had one of the greatest buildups, a drama with more elements than the periodic table, more plot lines than “Days of Our Lives,” and more questions demanding answers than the SATs.

Could Mo Greene join Carl Lewis as the only man ever to defend his Olympic title? Would the humble and devout Jamaican, Asafa Powell, snatch the Olympics’ signature event from the strutting, arrogant Americans, who act as if winning the Olympic 100 is part of the Bill of Rights? Would the Americans, who have been lectured about avoiding vulgar, flag-wrapped victory celebrations that last longer than the last Ice Age, celebrate in a dignified manner?

OK, forget that last question. It was just rhetorical anyway. Let’s get back to the race.

People run 100-meter races all the time. Just about every week during the track season, there’s a race somewhere in the world. It usually isn’t in the United States, where the track season lasts for one week ever four years, but it’s somewhere. People come and watch and cheer. Rivalries are born and nurtured. World champions are crowned.

The races matter to the promoters of the meets, the athletes who make their money 10 seconds at a time and the true track fans who pay to watch them. But as far as most of us are concerned, the 100 meters crowns a champion once every four years at the Olympics, at the only race that really counts, the one they ran Sunday night in Athens.

That makes it a 10-second race that takes four years to run. This one began in Sydney, Australia, when Maurice Greene blew the world's doors off and then spent the next six weeks — OK, it only seemed that long; in reality it was over in 1 1/2 weeks — prancing, posing, preening and giving people more reasons to dislike Americans, just in case they didn’t have enough of those already.

Ever since, Mo Greene has prepared for Athens and fed his rivals with regular challenges to their manhood.

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This is a young man’s race. The difference between first and second was one-hundredth of a second. At 10.152 meters per second — being a full-service sports column, we did the math for you — that’s one-tenth of a meter — 2 1/2 inches. The difference between first and third was 5 inches, and between first and fourth was 10 inches.

At those tolerances, the tiniest loss in reaction time or fast-twitch muscle mass can be the difference between a gold medal and a nice try.

Careers rise and fall in less time than it takes to read People magazine. New studs erupt from tracks around the world like weeds in a corn field. This year’s crop included Americans Shawn Crawford and Justin Gatlin, Powell, and Francis Obikwelu who came out of Africa to adopt Portugal as his home.

Greene said he’d beat them all, but Powell beat him in two Olympic warm-up meets. It didn’t matter, Greene said, and showed what he thought of everyone else’s chances by showing up in custom shoes whose uppers were decorated in the ever-popular stars-and-stripes motif and whose soles were an electric ruby red that looks as if they had been stolen from Judy Garland’s closet.

To a lot of people, Greene presented the biggest target in the world, all but carrying a self-executed bull's eye on his back.

But if you follow this sport, you know that the posing and the ’tude is part of the race. It’s been decades since "humble" has ever been used as an adjective with "100-meter champion."

If you’re not arrogant, you may as well not line up. You’ve got to believe you’re the world’s greatest stud if you want to even hope to win. And if you want to style and diss the competition, go right ahead, because if you’re as good as you say you are, they can’t do anything to you because you can outrun them all.

So, while you might want to flog Crawford and Gatlin for conducting a mid-race chat on the way to a one-two finish in their semifinal heat, go right ahead. But that’s the stuff that wins races.

Gatlin justified it all by winning the race by all of 2 1/2 inches. Obikwelu was second. Greene was third. Crawford was 5 inches back in fourth.

And while you can jump all over Gatlin for posing and hopping and prancing and giving half of the stadium high-fives, you better understand why he couldn’t have acted differently. And you ought to admit you wouldn’t want it any other way.

More than half the fun is watching the show afterward, and the truth is Gatlin was pretty subdued compared to Greene four years ago. He took a flag from someone in the stands, but he held it behind him, displaying it and not using it as a stage prop. And if he jumped and hopped all over, it was because he was the fastest man in the world for the next four years, and no one can take that away.

Greene, meanwhile, looked lost. As Gatlin celebrated and Obikwelu wondered how he could run so well and lose by so little, and Powell could look as if he couldn’t understand what happened, Greene wandered the track looking like a 4-year-old who’d lost his mother in a department store and really needed someone to point him in the right direction.

He finally got the photographic attention he craved by embracing Gatlin, two men wearing flags as capes, the old champion and the new champion.

But Greene’s history now. He can win every race between now and Beijing, but when the world’s fastest men line up on a Sunday evening four years hence, Justin Gatlin will be the defending champ, the stud of studs, the star of track’s greatest show.

The fastest man on earth — for at least 10 more seconds.

Track & field - Men's 100 meters (medals: Aug. 22nd) Medal Athlete Country Result Gold Justin Gatlin United States 9.85 Silver Francis Obikwelu Portugal 9.86 Bronze Maurice Greene United States 9.87 NBCO: Schedules, preliminary result and complete final results

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