No gong but Steve feels like a winner
STEVE Solomon is hungry.
While most would be content to have made an Olympic final at 19, he wants to catch the other two teenagers in the 400m field who just happened to go one and two.
Grenada’s Kirani James continued his remarkable rise – he won the world title last year – by winning London gold in 43.94sec, while fellow 19-year-old Luguelin Santos, the world junior champion from the Dominican Republic, took silver in 44.46sec.
Solomon finished eighth at 45.14sec, but that only fuelled his desire to latch on to the coat-tails of the pair for what is potentially a decade of exciting showdowns.
‘‘It just makes me that much hungrier and gives me that lust for success,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s kind of like when you have a slice of the cake, you always want to finish the cake.
‘‘That’s just really got me hungry and I know I have a lot more in me.
‘‘With Kirani, what a brilliant athlete and the first non-American to go under 44 seconds in a final, that’s just tremendous and I take a lot from that and I have a lot of admiration for him.
‘‘Luguelin Santos, a great runner, extremely talented guy and hopefully we will have many duels over the years to come and hopefully will get on top of them soon.’’
Solomon’s arrival into the psyche of the Australian public has been a rapid one, thanks mainly to being caught in the middle of a bitter dispute between Athletics Australia and former Commonwealth champion John Steffensen.
Neither runner had qualified for the individual event – they hadn’t run the A-standard time – but AA had the option of picking one B-standard athlete and they went for the Sydney teenager after he ran a personal best to finish third behind Santos at the world junior titles in Barcelona last month.
Solomon’s first race at the Olympic Games was a heat win in a personal best time. Twenty-four hours later he went sub-45 seconds for the first time in an Olympic semi-final.
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‘‘I always have high expectations of myself and being young and ambitious I always wanted to make this final,’’ Solomon said.
‘‘I’m really, really happy but someone has to come last in the race and unfortunately it was me.
‘‘I ran my heart out. I did the best I could so I’m really happy and I’m going to walk away from these championships with my head held high and really hungry for future success.’’
Solomon, who will team with Steffensen in the 4x400m relay later in the week, is relocating to Stanford University, California, next month to race on the NCAA circuit.
Darren Clark was 18 when he finished fourth at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Four years later he again finished fourth, becoming Australia’s greatest 400m runner.