BEIJING • The unbreakable rarely is.

Usain Bolt proved that again, besting Michael Johnson’s12-year record in the 200-meter sprint Wednesday. The Jamaican covered the distance in 19.30 seconds, .02 of a second better than the record Johnson set at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

“I did a lot of work in the 200 meters, and everything came together tonight,” Bolt said. “I blew my mind, and then I blew the world’s mind.”

Bolt was sixth out of the blocks, but in the 200, that matters little with an athlete who possesses Bolt’s size and ability.

Speed breaks down to two simple components: stride frequency and stride length. An increase in either one makes a runner faster. Bolt used a stride length of slightly more than nine feet and a frequency equal to that of his shorter opponents to get out front and only increase the lead.

This time Bolt ran the whole race, even leaning at the end. In setting the 100 world record Bolt began to slow down with more than 10 meters remaining.

There was no slowing in the 200, the race Bolt said he wanted more than any other. He finished a half-second in front of The Netherlands’ Churandy Martina who came in at 19.82 seconds. Bolt was 1.29 seconds in front of eighth place Kim Collins from Saint Kitts and Nevis.

“It’s those long strides,” Collins said. “He takes one stride; I take 2½ strides. I have to run 2½ times faster to keep with him.”

The scary thing about Bolt is that he just turned 22, literally.

“He’s still a baby,” track great Renaldo Nehemiah said. “… He’s got to get to 26, 27, 28 before he hits his prime. Yeah, it’s scary. He’s doing things no man of his stature could do. It’s beautiful thing, and he’s beautiful to watch. He’s poetry in motion. He’s not a beast.”

Not that it mattered to Bolt or his record, but there was quite a bit of confusion with the silver and bronze medals.

At first, it was thought that Wallace Spearmon finished third in 19.95 Spearmon actually took off around the track after the race, grabbing an American flag and celebrating with Bolt and Martina.

Spearmon got a little more than three-quarters of the way around the track – celebrating – before being told that he had been disqualified for stepping on the lane line.

About 90 minutes after the race, the American team, which had filed a protest, saw its protest upheld. Martina stepped on the lane line, too, disqualifying him.”As we were studying the video for Wallace, it was brought to our attention that there may have been a violation in lane 6,” Team USA coach Bubba Thornton said. “We saw the violation and appealed that result. We then went through the rules process. We wanted to make sure that the results of the race were fair.”

Jamaica’s Usain Bolt celebrated as he won the men’s 200-meter dash final in world-record fashion Wednesday in Beijing. Photo by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS