If you weren’t in Rio for the final round of the men’s competition, or perhaps you were under a rock, the CliffsNotes recap will suffice: Rose and Henrik Stenson went toe-to-toe until the last hole in the men’s competition, where the Englishman secured the gold medal in dramatic fashion with a birdie.
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The 33-year-old completed an Olympic long-distance “double double” in Rio on Saturday night by storming away to 5,000 metres gold, a week after retaining his 10,000m crown.
“I remember seeing Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat in Sydney and wondering if I could become Olympic champion at the time”, said Farah of the battle between the Ethiopian and the Kenya at the 2000 Olympics, which Gebrselassie won by ninth hundredths of a second.
On the women’s front, former world No. 1 Inbee Park beat current No. 1 Lydia Ko in a rout for the gold medal, but the competition for the silver and bronze medals also came down to the last hole.
“I don’t think there’s anything better than having the opportunity to hang gold medals on American athletes and listen to the Star-Spangled Banner”, said USOC Chairman Larry Probst.
Olympic legend Sally Gunnell today predicted Team GB will continue to triumph at next year’s World Championships.
The winning campaign extended Team USA’s reign atop the overall medal chart to six straight Games, dating back to 1996.
Locally, Australian sporting fans’ focus will now turn back to the football codes, especially with the finals just around the corner, and then the summer of cricket which starts in November and of course, the Melbourne Cup.
“She’s an incredible woman”, Van Niekerk said.
Some see a diminishing role for sports as an outlet for nationalism, thanks to China’s economic and military ascent on the global stage. He also pocketed a cool $746,000, the prize money under Singapore’s National Olympics Council program to reward athletes for medals won at the Olympics, Commonwealth, Asian and South East Asian Games.
American women also delivered some of the most memorable moments of the Rio Games.
Her wife Helen, 34, a fellow hockey squad member, said: “You feel proud when you see the medals going up and up”.
While the nightmarish scenarios envisioned before the Games didn’t occur, Rio likely did not come off as a future tourist destination for many viewers as other previous Olympics host cities did. But Andrew Butchart’s Scottish record-breaking run for sixth in the 5000m will promote him to the highest level of funding on the World Class Performance programme. A total of 50 incoming student-athlete Olympians will return to school in the fall, led by California’s 14-athlete contingent, followed by USC (9), Stanford (9) and UCLA (7).
New Zealand’s Lydia Ko, 19, finished second to become the youngest Kiwi female medal victor, while China’s Shanshan Feng vowed to grow the sport in the world’s most populous country with her bronze medal. The U.S.is one of only five nations to have accomplished the feat at the Olympic Games in summer competition and the first to do in 40 years. So we’ll go ahead and award his head-scratching statements their own set of medals.
Spain’s Susana Rodriguez and Patricia Rolf of the US made the first all-female referee tandem for an Olympic gold-medal match.
They leave Rio with 67, including 27 gold, sitting proudly second, above China and behind only the all-powerful United States.
Fewer than a third (32 per cent) of Britain’s 130 medallist attended fee-paying schools: a reduction of 4 percentage points since the London 2012 Olympics, when 36 per cent of Team GB’s medal-winners were privately educated. But Joyce could still count himself every inch a part of the GB success story.
“What a legacy. We wanted to ensure not just participation but to inspire people”.
But as much attention as they got, the antics of Lochte and his three cohorts and the freaky Hope Solo calling Sweden’s soccer players “cowards” were offset by a Team USA that not only romped in the medal count, finishing with 121, but made other important statements here.
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Bringing the Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro has been “good for everybody” to put sport in perspective, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach says. “These Olympians are inspiring the next generation”.
