Bernard Lagat, left, celebrates his win in the finals of the men’s 5000-meter run with Paul Chelimo at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, Saturday, in Eugene Ore.
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Typically, he can’t sleep the night before big races, and Friday night, before he raced for one of the three 200-meter spots on the U.S. Olympic roster, was no different.
Bernard Lagat made a decision to compete in the 5,000-meter run on a whim and the 41-year-old claimed the national title.
Joining them there will be 34-year-old Justin Gatlin, who won the 200-meter final to advance to his third Olympics.
After suffering rare losses to Ameer Webb and Michael Norman in the preliminary and semifinals respectively, Gatlin faced the added challenge of trying to hold off Merritt from his preferred inside lane.
Norman is from Murrieta, California, and plans to go to Southern California this fall. “I was the man to beat”.
Lagat and Mead redeemed themselves from a disappointing performance in the 10,000 on July 1, when they both wilted in the heat and didn’t finish the race. Anyway, today is a new day, and I have a fresh batch of predictions that may (or may not) be right!
That talk picked up previous year, when the Kenyan-born runner missed his first worlds or Olympics team since he became an American citizen in 2005 – a failure he said “crushed him” because his children were pushing hard for him to make the trip. He was not able to finish the 5,000 at the Prefontaine Classic last month and also did not finish the 10,000 here at trials.
Turns out, Lagat has plenty of gas in the tank.
Moving from sixth to first during that rapid last lap, Lagat pipped Hassan Mead, who clocked 13:35.70, and Paul Chelimo, who ran 13:35.92, as the top three booked their berths for Rio.
Unable to see the competition as he worked the curve, it turned the race into what he called “a glorified time trial”.
The 200-meter final pitted two of the United States’ top sprinters against each other on a middle ground: the Olympic 100-meter gold medalist Gatlin against Olympic 400-meter gold medalist LaShawn Merritt.
“These are the same people who saw me run in college”, Lagat said.
In the women’s 200m, reigning Olympic champion Allyson Felix shook off the rust to qualify for Sunday’s final.
The 30-year-old posted 43.97sec en route to winning the 400m, another season best. And like Merritt, she is an expert at pacing herself through the rounds in multiple races.
“I didn’t want that to be the last image”, Lagat said.
“Leave the stadium – because there’s so much love in the stadium the past couple of days – take that love with you and give it to somebody you’ve never loved before”.
“I don’t know what happened; I’m just going to go watch films”, she said. In 2004, in El Guerrouj’s long-awaited Olympic triumph, Lagat took silver.
Favourite David Oliver did not start the final after injuring his hamstring in the semi-finals. London Games medalists Aries Merritt and Jason Richardson did not make the team.
Merritt, the reigning Olympic champion and world record holder over the distance, had defied medical logic by returning to track and field this season following his kidney transplant last September.
These remarks came from a fellow who finished one spot out of a trip to the Olympics when Lagat’s stunning kick pushed Jenkins into fourth place.
“I came up a little bit short, I still feel that I was second or third so when it came up I was fourth I was shocked”, Merritt said.
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Will Clarke cleared 17 feet, 65 inches to win the triple jump. Christian Taylor and Chris Bernard also will head to Brazil. Her score of 3,822 points trailed leader Barbara Nwaba by 81 points. And despite being in his 40s, he now will run in his fifth Olympics in Rio after winning the 5,000-meter final Saturday. He won the 1,500 and 5,000 at the 2007 world championships for Team USA, a hard double, and also won four other world championships medals from 2001 to 2011.
