He then slowly walked to the stands, where he was greeted with a hug from his wife, Brianne Theisen-Eaton, a Canadian won the bronze in the women’s heptathlon last Saturday.
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Eaton, a 28-year-old OR native, beat out France’s Kevin Mayer in the 1,500-meter race, the final event in the two-day, 10-event competition, to also just edge Mayer in the overall competition by 8,893 to 8,834 points.
Congratulations to the couple on both of their wins!
Eaton finished off his championship run with a third-place finish in the 1500 meters, completing another special performance over the two-day, 10-event ordeal.
“Our coach said before we went out there, ‘It’s just like practice, just the whole world will be watching, ‘” said English Gardner, who ran the third leg. Concentrating on not messing that up for Bolt, a Jamaica team led by Asafa Powell got into the final but only finished second in their heat behind Japan.
Eaton captured the gold medal, his second in a row in the discipline. Canada’s Damian Warner won bronze.
While Eaton matched Sebrle’s record, Crouser was able to set a new Olympic best with a mighty winning throw of 22.52 metres in the shot put. “I look forward to competing against him every single time”, said Warner. “That’s what gave me a bit of comfort, that they really wanted it so bad”.
Track superstars Usain Bolt and Ashton Eaton scored Olympic gold medal wins on Thursday but they weren’t fast enough to stop NBC’s ratings from dipping.
A try for an unprecedented third gold seems unlikely at this point, as Eaton noted Thursday that the run-up to Rio was far more hard than the road to London.
By defending his 2012 gold, Eaton also made it three in a row for the US, with Bryan Clay winning the event at the 2008 Beijing Games.
France’s Mayer, 24, leapt into second place after a successful 5.4m pole vault, sharing the honour of highest vault of the day with Belgium’s Thomas van der Plaetsen.
Eaton angrily snapped back at his critics on social media, gaining him a larger fan base in Canada for sure.
Maroulis cried, too, but she was never intimidated by the odds she faced in taking home gold. “I’m so so happy and proud”. “I knew I was going to win”, Clement said.
Neither of those two performed strongly in the earlier events, however, and are placed 14th and 22nd overall respectively.
But considering where he was not too long ago, a medal in the competition that crowns the “world’s greatest athlete”, is very much indicative of how far he and the Canadian athletics program have come in a short amount of time.
Old or not, no one was going to get past him in that final stretch as he concentrated all his energies on reaching the line – and the expression of joy and relief as he crossed it was more intense than we have ever seen before.
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The Americans dropped the first two sets but stormed back in the fourth to even things up.
