Maier, the defending World Cup and Olympic giant slalom champion, was third in 2 33.50, just.03 hundreths of a second behind Kjus.
By an amazing eleven hundreths of a second, the Jamaican almost effortlessly broke his own time of 9.69sec in last year's Olympics to stun the Berlin crowd.
The South African is Olympic champion - he won from Michael Phelps by two one-hundreths of a second, collaring the American with his final stroke.
Frankie Fredericks beat the Olympic record by five hundreths of a second, and he was pipped to gold by a clear 10 yards.
In a sport where tenths, even hundreths, of a second often separate the top few finishers, Teuscher won the freestyle race by better than two seconds and the medley by almost four seconds.
Running his final indoor race of the season, the Kenyan-born Kipketer, who competes for Denmark, was timed in 2 minutes, 14.95 seconds, shaving 29 hundreths of a second off the record he set at Stuttgart, Germany, on Feb. 6.
Her victory margin of 43-hundreths of a second over the silver medalist, Pauline Davis-Thofpson of the Bahamas, was the largest in an Olympic 200 since 1960 when another African-American, Wilma Rudolph, dashed to gold in Rome.
Chambers, 33, also pocketed 11 points with a commendable time of 10.07 but he never looked like overhauling 21-year-old Lemaitre, who improved his own French record by one-hundreth of a second.
