What makes someone the fastest man on earth? The current tenant of the informal title held by such sporting icons as Jesse Owen and Carl Lewis starts with a version of the pastoral. Here is Usain Bolt as a child of nature, running free in the wilderness near the remote village that was his birthplace in Jamaica, plucking yams from the ground and bananas from the trees, body-building by carrying buckets of water home from the stream, and kept on the straight and narrow by regular ‘whoop-ass’ from his father.