New men’s 100m Olympic champion credits reconnection with his estranged father for giving him ‘the energy to be here today’
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the fastest man on the planet, the face of the 2020 Games, your new Olympic champion, wait, wait, I’ve got it here somewhere, on one of these pieces of paper, yes: Marcell Jacobs. If you don’t know – and plenty didn’t – you do now. Jacobs, a 26-year-old former long jumper, born in Texas, raised in Italy, won a wildly unpredictable and wide-open men’s 100m in 9.80sec. Which is pretty damn quick. And would have won almost every other Olympic final, including, yes, the last one at Rio in 2016, when Usain Bolt finished in 9.81sec.
And there he is, unavoidably. I say almost every Olympic final because there are two exceptions, Bolt’s twice-in-a-lifetime runs in Beijing in 2008 and London 2012. If you were watching on Sunday, you’ll have seen that World Athletics have started blacking out the stadium at the beginning of the sprint finals. It’s one of the new tricks they’re using to make the sport more appealing now that they’re having to do without their biggest star. Maybe they’re hoping that in the pitch blackness, no one will notice the shadow Bolt still casts over the sport.
