And we should totally disregard the fact that Holloway’s finish was all of 50 milliseconds slower than the gold medal time. Lyles’s and Holloway’s near-misses loom large – larger than they should, perhaps – because the US men’s track team will return from Tokyo without a single individual gold medal for the first time in modern Olympic history. Kenichiro Fumita, a Japanese wrestler, sobbed after a loss in the gold medal bout – a loss that yielded him a silver. In 2016, more than half the gold medalists in men’s track events had prior Olympic experience. “An Olympic medal is an Olympic medal,” he told reporters after the race.

Source: The Guardian August 08, 2021 09:00 UTC