Joy as US lift relay curse
● Gatlin’s relief at world victory
Justin Gatlin celebrated his first relay gold medal on Saturday as the US lifted their 4x100m curse with victory at the World Championships in Qatar.
The star-studded quartet of Gatlin, newly crowned 100m champion Christian Coleman, 200m gold medallist Noah Lyles and Michael Rodgers recorded the second-fastest time in history – 37.10 seconds – as they stormed home at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha.
The win comes at the tailend of 37-year-old Gatlin’s career, which has been studded with individual titles but no relay gold medals.
Gatlin has all too often been part of a pattern of failure that has seen a succession of talented US relay squads fail to add up to the sum of their parts.
Since the 1995 World Championships, the US has botched nine relays in major outdoor championships.
Gatlin said the pattern of failure had gnawed away at him for years.
“The gold means so much to me – probably more than any individual medal I’ve won,” he said.
“This gold has eluded me throughout my whole career.
“It’s always been just right outside the window, just always not able to get the job done and we were successful finally.
“I even felt like maybe it was me, but tonight we all got the job done.
“I take my hat off to my teammates, for being brave, and not feeling that stigma of Team USA always dropping the stick, or not finishing, or something always happening or going wrong.
“They broke that curse [on Saturday].”
The victory came after they were given a big scare in Friday’s semifinals, when the US came within a whisker of disqualification after a botched final handover.
A Canadian appeal against the US’s inclusion in the final was dismissed.
Gatlin, the 2017 world champion, said the squad had met earlier on Saturday to discuss the race.
“We are a brotherhood. “We had a talk and we said we are going to go out there and do this.”
Veteran Rodgers said they had been motivated by one thing.
“We wanted to do this for Justin.”
Defending champions Britain took silver as Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake ran a superb anchor leg to overhaul Japan’s Abdul Hakim Sani Brown.
Both the British and the Japanese set new European and Asian records, with times of 37.36sec and 37.43sec respectively.