“I came here to achieve three gold medals. I did what I had to”.
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Justin Gatlin took the silver medal after finishing with a time of 9.89 seconds, with Canada’s Neil DeGrasse claiming the bronze with a time of 9.91 seconds.
“We were just having some fun”, De Grasse said after Sunday’s final.
The result kept intact Bolt’s hopes of winning three successive Olympic gold medals in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay.
But he surged through from 60 metres to pass Gatlin and comfortably win his seventh Olympic gold.
It was the sweet culmination of a hard season for Bolt with a hamstring injury and lack of form raising questions on his ability to defend his Olympic titles.
“Man, at the end of the day being the oldest guy in the field and to say I’m going to be the oldest guy to get on the podium, it’s a victory within itself”, said the 34-year-old.
Some might argue his gutsy effort at last year’s world championships, when he overcame a season’s worth of injuries to beat Gatlin by.01, might have been the grittiest race he won.
“The Brazil crowd has been extremely great so far”, Bolt said. Twelve years later, the Brazilian lit the cauldron in the August 5 opening ceremony to begin the Rio Games.
A resident of Orlando, Florida, Gatlin served a one-year doping suspension after testing positive in 2001 for amphetamines contained in a medication he had taken for attention deficit disorder.
A bronze medal at the World Championships followed to announce his name on the worldwide stage.
Bolt’s win – his 18th gold in Olympic and World Championships since 2008 – averted what might have been a public relations disaster for the drug-tarnished world of track and field. “To know about that, you will have to wait for my upcoming documentary”, Bolt quipped, before admitting: “This time I mostly ate Asian food”.
And the sport’s greatest showman produced an even better run when it really mattered to send the Olympic Stadium into raptures.
“After the semifinals I felt extremely good and, as I said, I wanted to run faster”, he told BBC Sport.
The 22-year-old, running in his first Olympics, had the quickest reaction time as he blasted out of the blocks. But this is what we train for.
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“At 40 kilometers, I saw there were three of us, but I knew whatever happened, I couldn’t lose the gold and then I knew I was on the way to history”, she said. “When it comes down to it I have given him his closest races all his career”.
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Usain Bolt sauntered onto the track, stretched out his arms and waved his hands, signaling for more applause.
