RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – A changing of the guard in women’s sprints doesn’t mean a redrawing of the map.
That 100-meter Olympic gold medal is heading back to Jamaica, only this time in the hands of Elaine Thompson, the 24-year-old who took down America’s best, to say nothing of her training partner, two-time defending champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
Thompson turned what was supposed to be one of the most competitive races on the Olympic program into a runaway. Running even at the halfway mark with Fraser-Pryce and Tori Bowie of the United States, Thompson pulled away over the last half and defeated Bowie with a bookshelf-sized slice of daylight in between.
Thompson finished in 10.71 seconds, a full .12 seconds better than Bowie and only .01 off the time she ran at Jamaica’s national championships last month. Thompson’s 10.70 was the best of five sub-10.8 women’s sprints this year and certainly served notice that things could be changing once the sprinters reached Rio.
Three of those sub-10.8 women were in the final – Bowie and another American, English Gardner, were the others – as was Fraser-Pryce, the 29-year-old who was a brace-faced newcomer when she won her first of two golds at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing eight years ago.