Americans long shots on diamond
Team USA was almost there. Then, with the swing of a bat, Japan made the Americans’ hopes of coming home with Olympic baseball glory that much harder.
Team Japan’s Takuya Kai hit a walk-off single against Edwin Jackson in the 10th inning to beat Team USA, 7-6, and advance to the semifinals of the Tokyo Games on Monday.
Since this round, the second, is double elimination, Team USA still has a shot of advancing to the finals, but it will have to beat the winner of the Dominican Republic-Israel game and then the loser of the Japan-South Korea game. If the U.S. hopes to get that far, it can’t allow the next opponent to chip away at its lead, which is what happened against Japan.
HASSAN GOLDEN IN 5K
Sifan Hassan pointed to her left shoulder. “I have pain here,” she said.
Then, her right leg. “Pain here.” Then, she dropped her hands to her sides in exhaustion, too tired to explain it anymore. “Pain there.”
Winning the Olympics really can hurt sometimes. But it’s hard to keep the world’s busiest speed demon down for long.
Hassan scored two remarkable victories on the Olympic track Monday. Her gold-medal run in the women’s 5,000 meters came a mere 11 hours after she picked herself up from a scary fall on the final lap of her 1,500-meter heat to not only finish that race — but win it, as well.
Those two wins kept Hassan, the Ethiopian-born 28-year-old who now competes for the Netherlands, very much in the mix for not one, not two, but three medals — in the 1,500, the 5,000 and the 10,000.
U.S. TAKES DISCUS
The path to Valarie Allman’s gold medal — the first for the U.S. track and field team at Olympic Stadium — started with, of all things, a plate of spaghetti.
That promise of pasta from her high school team was enough to lure her into the discus and to the point she reached on a rainy night at the Tokyo Games: A breakthrough — and a much-needed gold medal for the United States.
Allman opened the final with a throw of 68.98 meters (226 feet, 3 inches) and then waited through an hour-long delay and around 50 throws by her competition. But nobody could pass her.