Agencies
Rio de Janeiro, August 16: For 9.81 glorious seconds here Sunday, all the ills that have dogged athletics recently were forgotten as Usain Bolt stormed to victory in the 100 metres final to become the first man to win three successive Olympic titles on the track.
The Jamaican superstar trailed arch rival Justin Gatlin, roundly booed by the Rio crowd for his doping past, until the 70-metre mark but then swept past the American, finding time to pat his chest as he crossed the line a metre clear.
Gatlin, the 2004 champion who came into the race with the season’s fastest time of 9.80s, took silver in 9.89s. Canada’s Andre de Grasse claimed bronze in 9.91 seconds – the same finishing order as in last year’s World Championships.
Victory took Bolt a step closer to his goal of winning a historic ‘triple-triple’ combination of gold in the 100m, 200m and the 4x100m relay in three consecutive Olympics.
Other than the 2011 World Championships, when he was disqualified for a false start, Bolt has won every other global championship individual sprint race since 2008.
That equates to five Olympic golds and seven in the World Championships. Throw in two more Olympic and four World Championship 4x100m relay golds and the world record in all three events and that is total and utter domination
“This is what we train for. I told you guys I was going to do it,” Bolt, 29, told reporters. “Stay tuned, two more to go. Somebody said I can become immortal. Two more medals to go and I can sign off. Immortal.”
But then the man who rarely complains about anything stated that he had been ‘rushed’ into the final. Faced with a turnaround time of barely over an hour between the semifinal and final, Bolt had trouble gearing up to be at his best for the marquee event of the Olympics.
“I don’t know who decided that,” Bolt said. “It was really stupid. So, that’s why the race was slow. There’s no way you can run and go back around and run fast times again. You need time to recover and I am growing old. So now it takes me more time to recover.”
If the fans were pleased with Bolt’s victory, it is hard to imagine the relief felt by officials of the IAAF and IOC, who must have been dreading a Gatlin victory.
The American has served two drugs bans, though he denies any deliberate wrongdoing for either, and at 34 was bidding to become the oldest 100m champion. But then Bolt had the last say again.
The time was a long way off his 2009 world record of 9.58 seconds but that was never the issue at stake.
Usain victory sparks panic at NYC airport
New York, August 16: Did boisterous celebrations over an Olympic victory by the world’s fastest man lead to a false alarm about gunfire and a panicked evacuation of Kennedy Airport here?
That’s one of the possibilities police were exploring Monday as they reviewed security camera footage and interviewed witnesses about the chain-reaction scare that rippled through two airport terminals Sunday night in the minutes after Usain Bolt sprinted to a gold medal victory in the 100-metre dash.
An internal New York Police Department briefing document, obtained by this agency, said a preliminary video review showed that some travellers had started to act ‘extremely disruptive’ while watching the Olympics on televisions in Terminal 8.
That set off a chain reaction, with other people running away from the commotion, the document said.
Then, at 9:34pm, about seven minutes after Bolt’s run, police received an anonymous 911 call from a woman reporting gunshots in the terminal.
It isn’t clear how the celebration might have come to be misinterpreted a few minutes later as gunshots.
Investigators were also unsure exactly how the commotion spread across the airport campus to Terminal 1, where rumours about a shooter, combined with the sound of alarms and sight of armed police, convinced some people that an attack was underway.