Christine Mboma knows the faster she runs the clearer her advantages with difference in sex development becomeChristine Mboma runs the 200 metres like no other elite sprinter in history. Her start is sluggish. Her drive phase needs work. But then her legs begin to whirr … and suddenly whoosh! One, two, three, four opponents are picked off. At the Olympics she flew from fifth with 50m left to win a silver medal. Last week she also added the Diamond League title in an Under-20 world record of 21.78 sec. What makes the 18-year-old’s achievements remarkable, aside from her age, is that she only began focusing on the 200m in July.Given time, and better technique, Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record of...
The runner has overtaken Carl Lewis as the most decorated US track Olympian, but her influence transcends athleticsIn 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...
Italy’s spectacular summer scuppered golden dreams in the men’s 4x100m, while the women’s team took bronzeThe mixed relays may have finished last weekend, but what a lot of conflicting emotions for the eight British sprinters who won medals in the 4x100m on Friday night.The men won the silver behind Italy, the women the bronze behind Jamaica and USA, and between them the British athletes ran the gamut from joy to frustration, anger and regret. Dina Asher-Smith was among the disappointed; she had hoped to win more than one bronze at these Games. It was not her injured hamstring that was nagging at her, but the sense that the relay team should have done better. Related: Laura Muir keeps faith and...
The Olympic journeys of Adam Peaty, Tom Daley and Matty Lee, and Matt Pidcock will inspire so many people back homeThis might sound a touch bizarre but I don’t think I quite understood the emotions that millions went through on Super Saturday until I was poolside on Magic Monday. You know that feeling when there is alchemy in the air, and in a blink of an eye one British gold suddenly turns into three. It was a bit like London 2012 when people thought Jessica Ennis-Hill would win, hoped that Mo Farah would join her, and then my long jump victory became the icing on top of a very large cake. Related: Adam Peaty urges UK after Tokyo gold: ‘Now...
At these tech-driven Tokyo Olympics, innovation is – as it has been for decades – a source of disquiet, but beating the odds is part of the Games’ mystiqueIn 1964, the Tokyo Olympics were dubbed the “Technology Games”. Up in the skies, satellites were used to televise all the action live for the first time. Computers abounded and spectators and TV viewers had never had it so good.Down at the events, we also saw changes. In the pool, there was now touchpad technology that meant we no longer relied on a judge’s eye to award a medal. It was still being fine-tuned but it was here to stay. In the pole vault we saw the introduction of fibreglass poles to...