THIS ISSUE IS FILLED with our coverage of a grandly entertaining Worlds XX, a global champs of superb quality. Anybody lucky enough to have spent 9 days marinating in the thrills and chills our sport’s elite elicit as they put their best foot (feet?) forward, inevitably hears the question: “What were the highlights for you?” Do you have till next Thursday?
At a World Championships, every morning session (there were 5 in Tokyo), every evening session, each and every one, is a 5-ring circus. Or more. Tokyo’s final evening featured 9 finals. “Highlights?” one asks oneself. “How about the final we just watched?”
I’ll call my 4-item list “Highlights and Takeaways.” I decline to number them.
•Mondo WR #14, 20-8 (6.30). The affable Swedish Louisianan, deeply respected by his fellow vaulters, soared through the edge of the possible. Again. For the third time at a Worlds or Olympics. Only this time the bar beckoned 4cm (an inch and a half) higher than it had at the Paris Games a year ago.
Mondo is a dragster on the runway — bearing a 17ft (5.20) rod of fiberglass and carbon fiber. His powerful plant, an impossible bending of the pole, plays out slowly at first — at least that’s the trick the observer’s mind plays. Then, instantly, he’s a rocket exploding off the top. His first two attempts were teasingly close. If one could only have heard the monologue in his head as he blocked out the crowd cacophony pouring down on him before that final make. Nobody does it like Mondo, nor is anyone likely to for a very long time.
•The McLaughlin-Levrone MR/AR, 47.78. Sydney was made for the biggest stages, the gold medal moments. History’s greatest 400m hurdler hones her talents with driven determination befitting the repetitious discipline of host nation Japan’s katana sword-making. Figuratively for SML, it’s layer, hammer, forge and polish as though her body and mind were the hardest steel.
In Tokyo SML willed herself to flow into a zone of flat 400 times unseen for 4 decades. Her facial expression and body language after her victory telegraphed shock. Emotional? Physical? Or did her visage reflect only relief? After pushing through round after round, no doubt, of broadcast interviews, she spoke for less than 3 minutes with the written press.
SML holds her inner feelings close. She’s the 21st century sport’s Greta Garbo. She lets her racing do the talking — and it roars.
•Jamaica-USA Sprint Rivalry Heated Up. In the men’s 100, Oblique Seville and Kishane Thompson took back the crown from Budapest/Paris champion Noah Lyles with Kenny Bednarek 4th. Two nations, the first four places.
Lyles’ trademark half-lap finish earned his fourth straight WC gold in the event. Bednarek’s 19.58 for silver missed his best by just 0.01 and a new Jamaican name, Bryan Levell, scored a 19.64 PR in the first WC or OG where sub-19.7 was needed to medal. In the 4×1, the USA relayed to a second straight WC gold. Meanwhile, Jamaica, which has not won at this meet since Usain Bolt’s next-to-last appearance in 2015, fumbled the baton in its heat, a malady more often associated with the team in red, white and blue.
The USA’s Melissa Jefferson-Wooden made the women’s dashes a double with blowout margins and a WC Record in the 100. Yeah, her feats take some shine off my “rivalry” premise here. Yet, it was Jamaican legend Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s footsteps she followed in for double individual gold.
Here, at 38 in her 17th world class season, “Mommy Rocket” Fraser-Pryce led off Jamaica’s silver medal 4×1 unit that gave no quarter to the gold medal U.S. quartet throughout a madcap lap. The USA/Jamaica thing — with many fans from both nations on hand — set alight the oval in Tokyo and SAFP exited the stage with her 17th Worlds medal.
•It Only Takes One. This pick is my Wild Card. Perhaps not if you were there. Daniel Ståhl! Throughout a discus comp rendered absurd by drenching rain, the 6-7½/353 Swedish giant smiled, played to the fans and at the end stepped into the slip-and-slide ring for the penultimate performance of the entire Championships. Calm, collected, he then blasted out World Champs history’s fourth-ever winner to fly past 70 meters and 230ft. He reached 231-2 (70.47).
Ståhl erupted in glee. He repeated as champion, he earned a third discus gold, just the third man to do so. His 2.63m (8-5) margin over WR holder Mykolas Alekna, who could not top the Swede on the competition’s final throw, was WC history’s second-largest.
The competition was a farce of wipeouts, endless, darkly comical toweling off of a ring that delivered no traction; manifest injury risk to athletes and mountains of frustration for mountainous men. Were it not on the final night, surely it would have been postponed.
Beautifully, however, one man— the one who laughed the most throughout — met his moment. The crowd, a large proportion of the 58,000+ who turned out for the final evening, stuck around in the damp to revel in it with him.
