Flight VS069 touched down a little late on the airstrip in Kingston's Norman Manley Airport yesterday and a hesitant Usain Bolt made his way from the front to the back of the plane. He high-fived and signed autographs as he moved past the passengers but this was merely a light preview for what was about to hit him.

Out on the tarmac, a large crowd grew. At the centre of it was the Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, but there were opposition ministers and other members of the Cabinet there, too. Bolt looked nervously from the window at what was about to greet him.

“Where are your medals?” one of the air hostesses asked, attempting to calm him. “I'll wear them if you don't.”

"I worked hard for those,” Bolt replied, and at that point the doors opened and he was home.

This was just the start of an exceedingly long homecoming for Bolt and his fellow gold medal-winning heroes from the Jamaica team at the Beijing Olympics.

They don't like to do things fast here in Jamaica - except, of course, for their sprinting - and Bolt's movement from tarmac to car and by motorcade to the centre of town was a five-mile journey that took over an hour.

Airport staff said that they had not seen the place like this since Fidel Castro touched down. And you could only imagine how much more loud, colourful and chaotic it would have been had an element of the nation's exuberance not been swept away by the tail end of Hurricane Ike.

There is little underestimating the effect that Bolt and his fellow Jamaican kings and queens of speed have had on their nation. His journey into Kingston yesterday was given a live commentary by KLAS Sports Radio, as if it was a royal wedding, occasionally breaking to play one of the many songs that the island's reggae artists had composed in that glorious August.

“Victory filled my belly more than food,” was the chorus of one of the beats that drummed Bolt into town yesterday.

Bolt's red BMW led the way yesterday, followed by the Prime Minister in the car behind, and all the while pursued by screaming, sprinting children in their khaki school uniforms, cheering alongside their hero while the wind blew and the clouds chucked down the worst of Hurricane Ike's rain upon them. But nothing, it seems, could dull the spirit. Radio KLAS reported that cars would soon start getting stuck in the mud on the side of the road, it also broke its running commentary to run a debate on whether Bolt had overtaken Bob Marley as the island's most famous son, and yet still the motorcade crawled on, passed the Carib Cement Company, where workers downed tools to cheer him through, and on it went.

Somewhere in the middle of this it was noted that Bolt's family had got left behind at the airport and that no one had taken Bolt's passport to send it through immigration. Little, though, can halt this man's progress.

So you have to wonder what happens a little farther down the line in early October, when the official celebrations are planned. When all Jamaica's medal-winners are home, there will an official national holiday lasting three days and in some parts of the island they are planning for six.

That is the effect that the Olympics had on Jamaica. Barbara Blake Hannah, a special consultant to the Ministry of Information, Culture and Sports, said: “Sports is one thing that holds Jamaica together. I heard that on the day of Bolt's 100 metres, no one here was killed. Even murder took a holiday for him.”