When the gun fired, Usain Bolt’s form in global 100m and 200m finals read: WWWW, DSQ (false start), WWWWWWWWW. Few except his seven rivals wanted it to end with an ‘L’ for loss. Bad news: it did. Time, and Justin Gatlin, who has served two drugs bans, killed the perfect send-off.
You may never see a greater anti-climax. In this one, the world champion was jeered while the darling of the global crowd was acclaimed as the hero. Gatlin won in a time of 9.92 secs, with his fellow American Christian Coleman second in 9.94secs and Bolt third (9.95secs). Frankly, it was an awful result for track and field, where a culture of forgiveness allowed Gatlin to return to professional sprinting after offences in 2001 and 2006 – and finally overcome his longstanding inability to deal with Bolt, who called the victor “a good person.”
There was no animosity down there on the track, but a Gatlin win, at 35, was an embarrassment to athletics, where there was a rash of drugs scandals after the 2012 London Olympics in this very stadium. Gatlin is by no means the only top athlete who has been given a second or third chance after pharmaceutical cheating, but his transgressions stand out in sprinting, which has led the way in conning the public.
