| All attention was on Bolt in his last-ever meeting. The 30 year-old Jamaican had the fastest second place of the three semi-finals, so was assigned a seeded lane in the final along with the three semi winners, Simbine, Blake and new US Champion Coleman. Gatlin, the silver medallist from Moscow and Beijing, was in lane 7. Coleman had the fastest reaction at the start of the final and was ahead at 10m from Gatlin. At halfway, Coleman (5.52) was still well clear of Gatlin (5.59) with Blake third, just ahead of Bolt and Vicaut. Bolt then began to gain ground and produced the fastest second half of the race (4.31). He couldn’t catch Coleman in time, but on the other side of the track, Gatlin did manage to edge ahead to regain his world title after 12 years. His winning mark of 9.92, into a headwind, was a world over-35 best. For the first time, Bolt had won a bronze medal. The immediate reaction of some of the crowd was to boo the American winner, who had defeated their sentimental favourite. Biomechanical analysis revealed that Bolt took 40.98 strides to complete the race, almost the same as he had in Berlin 2009 (40.92), but a bit less effective eight years on. |
