Jamaica's Usain Bolt clocked a 100m world record of 9.72 seconds on Saturday to electrify the Reebok Grand Prix athletics meeting.
The 21-year-old broke the previous record of 9.74 seconds set by compatriot Asafa Powell in Rieti, Italy, on Sept. 9 last year.
With a favorable wind of 1.7mps, Bolt finished ahead of 100m and 200m World Champion Tyson Gay of the US (9.85 seconds) and American Darvis Patton (10.07 seconds).
PHOTO: AP
On a night when thunderstorms and the threat of lightning forced a 45 minute disruption to the action — and that after the start of the meet was delayed for an hour — Bolt delivered the real jolt of the night.
The 1.95m tall Jamaican immediately became the man to beat as the athletics season builds toward the Beijing Olympics in August, with Gay, Powell and the rest of the world’s sprinters relegated to the role of challengers.
“This world record doesn’t mean a thing unless I get the Olympic gold medal, or win at the World Championships,” he said.
Bolt, the 200m world championships silver medalist, had set the athletics world buzzing on May 3 when he clocked 9.76 seconds — then the second-fastest time in history — at a meeting in Kingston.
With that performance he appeared poised to live up to his earlier credentials, which included world junior records and being the youngest man to reach a World Championship sprint final, at Helsinki in 2005.
While Bolt is now front and center in the 100m reckoning, he said the 200m remains his passion.
“I always say the 200 is my favorite race. That’s not going to change,” said Bolt, who is considered by many a likely threat to Michael Johnson’s 200m world record of 19.32 seconds set in Atlanta in 1996.
On the same East River island in New York City — but at a different stadium — that saw Leroy Burrell and Frank Budd set previous 100m world records, Bolt blazed out of the blocks and was never threatened.
“I knew if I got out of the blocks OK, I’d have a good chance,” Bolt said. “I knew this was a fast track and that I was ready to run something in the 9.7’s. But 9.72, that’s pretty good. When I saw the time they put on the board [at first 9.71] I realized it was something special.”
The large contingent of Jamaican fans among the sellout crowd of 6,490 at the Icahn Stadium went wild with delight.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier