American runners continue their dominance on track
RIO DE JANEIRO — Late Saturday at sparsely populated Olympic Stadium, the proceedings on the final night of track and field vacillated between bet-the-ranch certainty and murky ambiguity. Four American women ran four laps as a team, which meant one portion of the night would provide predictability. The rest of it? Well, hardly anybody knew how to interpret the events, or in some cases even what had happened in the first place.
Start with the cleanest part: The U.S. women’s 4x400-meter relay team won its sixth consecutive gold medal, the latest milestone in a dynasty punctuated by Allyson Felix, the anchor, raising the baton above her head as she crossed the line, having left her nearest pursuer far behind.
One night after the U.S. men’s 4x100 relay team suffered disqualification because of a shabby handoff, the 4x400 team — Arman Hall, Tony McQuay, Gil Roberts and anchor LaShawn Merritt, who won his second career gold — matched the women with a gold of their own. File that under the easy portion of the night, too, because American victory became customary this past week. The United States has won 31 track and field medals, the most since 1956, 13 of them gold, their top performance since 1996.
That seemed cut-and-dried compared with the loopy aftermath of the men’s 5,000 meters. One American lost a silver via disqualification and another leapt from fifth to third place on rulings even he was not sure how to feel about. At least that’s how it stood for about an hour.
Paul Chelimo, a 25-year-old who serves in the U.S. Army, smashed his personal best by more than 15 seconds to cross the line second with a time of 13:30.90, less than a second behind Great Britain’s unimpeachable Mo Farrah. Chelimo celebrated the achievement of his life until an NBC reporter informed him, on live TV, that he had been disqualified for jostling.
Original bronze medalist Mohammed Ahmed of Canada had also been disqualified, which bumped Bernard Lagat, 41, in his fifth Olympics from fifth to third, on to an Olympic podium for the first time.
But about an hour after the disqualifications had been announced, the IAAF reversed the decision and reinstated Chelimo. The initial devastation could be replaced by a medal, for him. For Lagat, it turned out the first medal as a U.S. citizen — he owns two for Kenya — was only temporary.