Felix ends stellar career with bronze in 4x400 relay
EUGENE, ORE.
Never mind that she got passed at the end of her last sprint around the track. Or ended up with a bronze medal instead of gold.
For 15 memorable seconds Friday night at the world championships, Allyson Felix was sprinting alone in the sunshine, cruising past the stands and far ahead of the field down the backstretch.
A few minutes later, she was taking her newly won prize and hanging it around her 3-year-old daughter’s neck.
“I felt the love,” Felix said of her final run on the big stage. “And I felt joy running tonight.”
She’s 36 now. So it was no huge shock that a runner 11 years her junior, Marileidy Paulino of the winning Dominican Republic team, eventually reeled her in. No big shame, either, that the U.S., saving the rest of its vaunted star power for big races over the next nine days of this meet, finished third in the mixed 4x400 meter relay, also behind the Netherlands.
The third-place finish still gave Felix her 19th medal at world championships, extending a record she already held. Adding it to the 11 she’s taken at the Olympics, she’ll end her career with an even 30 at her sport’s biggest events.
Some might say a bronze medal feels like a letdown for the most decorated sprinter in U.S. history. Others, though, including Felix herself, compare it to the bronze she won in the women’s 400 last year at the Tokyo Olympics — a medal she ranks as one of her most cherished triumphs.
“It’s a similar emotion,” she said. “The last couple of years, I’ve stepped outside of just the clock and the medals, and I never would have imagined that would have been a place where I would come to.”
Felix was entered only in the mixed relay after failing to qualify for the worlds in an individual race.
When her name was announced at the beginning, the two-thirds-full house at the first world championships to be held in the United States cheered as loudly as they had all night.
The U.S. finished in 3:10.16. The stat sheet said Felix ran her final 400 meters in 50.15 seconds. It’s nowhere near the 47.72-second split she ran in a gold-medal 4x400 at worlds in 2015 — still the fastest ever by an American woman — but that was hardly the point.
SATURDAY’S EVENTS
Endurance icon Sifan Hassan wasn’t going for three medals this time. Now, she won’t even get two.
The Dutch distance workhorse got outraced to the line in a fight-tothe-finish 10,000 meters Saturday at world championships. She finished fourth, behind Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia, Hellen Obiri of Kenya and Obiri’s late-charging teammate, Margaret Chelimo Kipkemboi.
Gidey won in 30 minutes, 9.94 seconds. Only 0.62 seconds separated the top four runners.
It means Hassan’s only chance for a medal will come next week in the 5,000 meters, a race in which she is the reigning Olympic champion.
The 29-year-old also won the 10,000 and took bronze in the 1,500 last summer in Tokyo, finishing a three-medals-inthree-races combo that had never been done before.
She scaled back this year, not wanting to race nearly 25,000 meters over six races — prelims and finals included — in the span of a week. The 10,000, a distance at which she won the world championship in 2019, seemed to be setting up perfectly for her as the runners reached the backstretch with about 200 meters to go.
In a five-woman phalanx battling for three medals, Hassan pulled out wide and drew into third place, just behind Gidey and Obiri. But she could not pass either, and over the last 40 meters, Kipkemboi put on a charge to pass Hassan on the inside.
Hassan is expected back on the track Wednesday for prelims in the 5,000, the distance she has never captured at worlds.
Gidey added this gold to a silver she won three years ago at worlds in Doha and a bronze from the Tokyo Olympics last year.
She was the first champion on a day that also included the men’s 100 meters on the evening schedule. Fred Kerley ran a 9.79 in the opening round, setting himself up as a favorite in a race that will include defending world champion Christian Coleman and reigning Olympic champion Marcel Jacobs.