“I’m going to stay up late and have fun”, Bolt said.
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Asked what he will do when he gets home, Cisse said: “I want to hug my parents, this is the first thing”.
After completing the “triple triple” of Olympic sprint titles in Rio on Friday, Bolt summed it up by saying: “There you go”.
Even the gods, of some sort, seemed to agree Friday night.
He has now won the sprint treble – 100m/200m/4x100m – at the past three Olympic Games.
Nine times now, from Beijing to London to Rio, you could say that and feel it in the current generated by Bolt.
“After warmups I thought, ‘OK, I’m on.’ Then after warmups, everything just shut down”.
At the 2013 world championships in Moscow, with heavy rain falling, Bolt mimed putting up an umbrella and appropriately lightning bolts lit up the sky around the stadium. “I’m going to miss the crowds. I hope I’ve set the bar high enough that no one can do it again”.
The American men crossed the line third, in 37.62. This made the ninth time since 1995 that the US men’s team has been disqualified or have failed to get the baton change done at an Olympics or world championships event.
All credit to the 32-year-old Cheruiyot – who won world titles at this event in 2009 and 2011 and took silver behind the Ethiopian last week despite running a time that was within a second of the old world record – and Obiri for hanging in there. The Canadians were bumped up to third, 37.64. This string has both generated widespread disbelief and proven seemingly resistant to every well-intentioned effort at change.
There was plenty of controversy in the women’s 4x100m relay with the US winning gold after being initially disqualified in the heats. Only the winning American 40.82, a world record from London, is faster.
The Jamaicans, anchored by Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, ran 41.36 for silver – third-fastest in Olympic history.
“When there aren’t other circumstances out of our control, we can kind of get the job done”, Gardner said later.
Earlier this year USA Track & Field instituted a conflict-of-interest rule precluding its national relay coach from also individually coaching anyone in the relay pool, and Mitchell, who coaches Gatlin, stepped down.
“I have to make a new bucket list now”, he said.
But whatever number Bolt’s Olympic haul turns out to be, tonight he is ideal.
Bolt, who has never failed a dope test unlike five athletes in just the American and Jamaican teams in Friday’s relay final, had a more upbeat assessment.
Bolt insisted all of his gold medals were special. Same as the Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina, the American swimmer Mark Spitz and the Finnish distance star Paavo Nurmi.
The inevitable question is whether Bolt – and this of course assumes he has competed clean – is the greatest Olympic athlete of all time.
The Ethiopian’s mid-race surge took her 40 metres clear at one point before they hunted her down and swooped past her on the penultimate lap.
His 9.58 record at the world championships in Berlin in 2009 was an even bigger sensation.
For Bolt, who will retire in 2017, the relay gold was the final act of an incredible Olympic career that redefined athletics and often left commentators scrambling to find a new vocabulary of superlatives as each new milestone came and went.
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For Bartoletta, it was her second gold in Rio, after she also won the long jump.
