The runner has overtaken Carl Lewis as the most decorated US track Olympian, but her influence transcends athletics
In the minutes after the end of the very last event, an army of construction workers filed into the Olympic Stadium to start getting it ready for the closing ceremony. The athletes were still making their way out through the line of TV, radio and press interviews while the workers were marching past them, hauling palettes of stacked plastic matting to lay over the track and great rolls of fabric to unwrap. The Olympics are winding down, and the athletics is wrapping up. Looking back on what’s happened here in the last nine days, you can see the ways in which the Games have started to change.
The most keenly anticipated race of these Olympics wasn’t the men’s 100m but the women’s, and the biggest stars of the athletics championships were Elaine Thompson-Herah, who swept all three sprints, and Sifan Hassan, who completed an unprecedented treble when she followed her victory in the 5,000m and her bronze in the 1,500m with another gold medal in the 10,000m. And then there was Allyson Felix, who says she has enjoyed every minute of it.
