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Usain Bolt seals gold for Jamaica in London 2012 4x100m relay final
• Jamaica beat USA in world record time of 36.84sec
• Bolt's six gold medals makes him Olympic's greatest sprinter
Usain Bolt celebrates after sealing the gold medal for Jamaica in the 4x100m relay at the London 2012 Olympic Stadium. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
How else did you think it would end? How else could it end? With the greatest sprinter of all time dipping for line, raising 80,000 people to their feet. When Usain Bolt took the baton for the final leg of the final event in the London Olympic Stadium he found himself, for what felt like the first time in four years, in a real race. He was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the USA's Ryan Bailey, who was running in the lane outside him. Bailey took the USA to the line in a time of 37.04sec, which equalled the old world record. The trouble was that Bolt was already beginning to celebrate a new one. Bolt, Yohan Blake, Michael Frater, and Nesta Carter ran the 4x100m in 36.84, the first team in history to run it in under 37sec.
Bolt has now surpassed Carl Lewis as the most decorated sprinter in Olympic history. He has six gold medals, which is one more than Lewis won on the track. The only hiccup in it all was the delay he, his team-mates and the crowd had to endure while the officials checked the result.
Camera shots of Bolt talking to a man in a blazer suggested, just for a moment, that he might be about to get some bad news. But it turned out that it was the Canadian team who had been disqualified, which caused two of their team, Oluseyi Smith and Justyn Warner, to start crying into the flags they had just been waving in celebration of the bronze they thought they had won.
The weather was a little colder than Bolt might have liked, but he paid his own little tribute to Britain by imitating Mo Farah's celebrations from earlier in the evening, raising both arms and dipping both hands to make an M shape. It was a nice touch from a man who, for all his larking, is more gracious than many people give him credit for. As for the showboating, the man just cannot help it. He was still pulling muscle-man poses for the crowd while Carter was settling into the blocks for the first leg.
The USA brought in Tyson Gay and Bailey to the quartet who had broken the USA's 20-year-old national record in the heats. "We're going to figure out a way to go out there and compete with them," Justin Gatlin had said. "We're not scared of them."
Their plan was obvious. They put their two quickest men, Gatlin and Gay, on the middle legs. They wanted to get ahead of Jamaica before the baton got to Bolt. And they did, because Gatlin was matched up against Jamaica's slowest runner, Frater. Then they were hoping to ruffle Bolt by making him run alongside Bailey, who is only an inch shorter and a good deal more bulky than the champ.
France had the same thought, front-loading the line-up with Jimmy Vicaut and Christophe Lemaitre on the first two legs. They were beaten, too, losing the battle for bronze to Trinidad & Tobago. Great Britain's time from the heats, incidentally, would have beaten both those two teams.
That, though, was all happening way back in the wake of Bolt and Bailey. This is an event that the USA liked to think they had a freehold on. They had won it at 15 of the previous 21 Olympics they have competed at it in. This was their third defeat in a row, and you wonder whether they are going to get back on top of the podium any time soon.
Jamaica, which has a population a touch under 3 million, has such strength in depth that it could have run an entire alphabet of reserve teams, never mind just a 'B' side. There are 11 men on the island who have run the 100m in 10sec or under, something only four British men have ever done. Cut them a little more slack, and you will find there are 17 Jamaicans who have run the Olympic 100m qualifying time of 10.18 in the past four months alone.
Jamaica had already run the four of the five-fastest 4x100m times in history, one in the heats here and the other three in the finals of the last three major athletics championships, the worlds in Berlin and Daegu, and the Beijing Olympics. They used a rotating cast of seven men to do it: Carter, Frater, Asafa Powell, Kemar Bailey-Cole, Steve Mullings, and, of course, Blake and Bolt.
They have five of the 10 fastest sprinters in history to choose from, and that is before you even bring in the 200m specialists such as Warren Weir, who won the bronze in that event last Thursday.
So the fact that they were missing Powell, because of the groin strain he suffered in the 100m final last Saturday, was hardly likely to slow them down much. Brilliantly, after Jamaica and the USA, the third-fastest relay team in history are not Great Britain, Russia, France, or Trinidad & Tobago but the Racers Track Club. That one little group from Kingston put out a quartet in 2009 that ran faster than every other country on the planet.
They can do it without Powell; they could probably do it without Bolt too. Some day soon they may have to. Bolt says he wants to retire by the time he is 30. That will be almost exactly after the Rio Olympics.
He has said that when he goes home and reminisces about the journey he has been on, he may shed a tear or two. They could be the same tears that Alexander wept when he realised he had no worlds left to conquer.
• Jamaica beat USA in world record time of 36.84sec
• Bolt's six gold medals makes him Olympic's greatest sprinter
- Andy Bull at the Olympic Stadium
- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 August 2012 17.03 EDT
- Jump to comments (7)
Usain Bolt celebrates after sealing the gold medal for Jamaica in the 4x100m relay at the London 2012 Olympic Stadium. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty ImagesHow else did you think it would end? How else could it end? With the greatest sprinter of all time dipping for line, raising 80,000 people to their feet. When Usain Bolt took the baton for the final leg of the final event in the London Olympic Stadium he found himself, for what felt like the first time in four years, in a real race. He was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the USA's Ryan Bailey, who was running in the lane outside him. Bailey took the USA to the line in a time of 37.04sec, which equalled the old world record. The trouble was that Bolt was already beginning to celebrate a new one. Bolt, Yohan Blake, Michael Frater, and Nesta Carter ran the 4x100m in 36.84, the first team in history to run it in under 37sec.
Bolt has now surpassed Carl Lewis as the most decorated sprinter in Olympic history. He has six gold medals, which is one more than Lewis won on the track. The only hiccup in it all was the delay he, his team-mates and the crowd had to endure while the officials checked the result.
Camera shots of Bolt talking to a man in a blazer suggested, just for a moment, that he might be about to get some bad news. But it turned out that it was the Canadian team who had been disqualified, which caused two of their team, Oluseyi Smith and Justyn Warner, to start crying into the flags they had just been waving in celebration of the bronze they thought they had won.
The weather was a little colder than Bolt might have liked, but he paid his own little tribute to Britain by imitating Mo Farah's celebrations from earlier in the evening, raising both arms and dipping both hands to make an M shape. It was a nice touch from a man who, for all his larking, is more gracious than many people give him credit for. As for the showboating, the man just cannot help it. He was still pulling muscle-man poses for the crowd while Carter was settling into the blocks for the first leg.
The USA brought in Tyson Gay and Bailey to the quartet who had broken the USA's 20-year-old national record in the heats. "We're going to figure out a way to go out there and compete with them," Justin Gatlin had said. "We're not scared of them."
Their plan was obvious. They put their two quickest men, Gatlin and Gay, on the middle legs. They wanted to get ahead of Jamaica before the baton got to Bolt. And they did, because Gatlin was matched up against Jamaica's slowest runner, Frater. Then they were hoping to ruffle Bolt by making him run alongside Bailey, who is only an inch shorter and a good deal more bulky than the champ.
France had the same thought, front-loading the line-up with Jimmy Vicaut and Christophe Lemaitre on the first two legs. They were beaten, too, losing the battle for bronze to Trinidad & Tobago. Great Britain's time from the heats, incidentally, would have beaten both those two teams.
That, though, was all happening way back in the wake of Bolt and Bailey. This is an event that the USA liked to think they had a freehold on. They had won it at 15 of the previous 21 Olympics they have competed at it in. This was their third defeat in a row, and you wonder whether they are going to get back on top of the podium any time soon.
Jamaica, which has a population a touch under 3 million, has such strength in depth that it could have run an entire alphabet of reserve teams, never mind just a 'B' side. There are 11 men on the island who have run the 100m in 10sec or under, something only four British men have ever done. Cut them a little more slack, and you will find there are 17 Jamaicans who have run the Olympic 100m qualifying time of 10.18 in the past four months alone.
Jamaica had already run the four of the five-fastest 4x100m times in history, one in the heats here and the other three in the finals of the last three major athletics championships, the worlds in Berlin and Daegu, and the Beijing Olympics. They used a rotating cast of seven men to do it: Carter, Frater, Asafa Powell, Kemar Bailey-Cole, Steve Mullings, and, of course, Blake and Bolt.
They have five of the 10 fastest sprinters in history to choose from, and that is before you even bring in the 200m specialists such as Warren Weir, who won the bronze in that event last Thursday.
So the fact that they were missing Powell, because of the groin strain he suffered in the 100m final last Saturday, was hardly likely to slow them down much. Brilliantly, after Jamaica and the USA, the third-fastest relay team in history are not Great Britain, Russia, France, or Trinidad & Tobago but the Racers Track Club. That one little group from Kingston put out a quartet in 2009 that ran faster than every other country on the planet.
They can do it without Powell; they could probably do it without Bolt too. Some day soon they may have to. Bolt says he wants to retire by the time he is 30. That will be almost exactly after the Rio Olympics.
He has said that when he goes home and reminisces about the journey he has been on, he may shed a tear or two. They could be the same tears that Alexander wept when he realised he had no worlds left to conquer.
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