2016 RIO OLYMPICS: Usain Bolt Completes Triple-Triple (9 Gold Medals In 3 Olympics)

Usain Bolt of Jamaica proved (again) that he is one of the greatest track and field athletes of all time by winning his 9th Gold medal on Friday, anchoring his country's 4x100m Olympics relay team to a 3rd consecutive win. Bolt earlier won the Olympics 100m for the 3rd time (in a time of 9.81s) and the Olympics 200m for the 3rd time (in a time of 19.78s).

Bolt is tied with American Carl Lewis and Finland's Paavo Nurmi for the most gold medals in track and field. Of course, American swimmer Michael Phelps has the most Gold medals (23!) of any Olympic athlete (plus 2 silver and 3 bronze).

Olympiad XXX: Jamaica Wins 4x100 Relay (36.48s)!

The Jamaican 4x100 relay team of Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake, Michael Frater and Nesta Carter won the Gold medal in the event with a stunning time of 36.84 seconds, a new world record, averaging 9.21 seconds per leg, which is far faster than either Bolt or Blake ran the 100m in their medal-winning performances earlier in the week!

The Jamaican team beat the Americans' time of 37.04 (equalling an American record) and even though the Canadian team crossed the finish line third, their team was disqualified because Jared Connaughton stepped on the lane boundary, which was only discovered during the official video playback review after the team was celebrating their Bronze medal finish! So Trinidad and Tobago was awarded the Bronze medal, completing an outstanding track and field event for Caribbean-based teams.

Olympiad XXX: 19yo Wins Grenada's 1st Ever Gold

19-year-old athletic sensation Kirani James of my home country of Grenada won the gold medal in the Men's 400m dash at the London Olympics last night. It was Grenada's first medal of any kind despite competing in every Summer Olympics since 1984. James, although only 19, is the reigning World Champion in the 400m and became the first non-American man to complete the one-lap race in under 44 seconds, finishing in 43.94s.

Winning the silver was 18-year-old Luguelin Santos of the Dominican Republic and the bronze medalist was Lalonde Gordon of Trinidad and Tobago completing a Caribbean sweep of the event. Also in the final race was the unusual site of twin brothers Kevin and Jonathan Borlée of Belgium, who finished 5th and 6th just 0.02s apart from each other.

But the night belonged to James who in the last few years has begun to put Grenada on the map for his prowess in the 400 meters in a similar way to how Jamaica is now known for world-class sprinters (and deep seated homophobia!)

Caribbean runners (or runners for other countries who are of Caribbean descent) have been dominating the sprints at this year's Olympics with Jamaicans winning both the men's and women's 100m.

Olympiad XXX: Bolt Wins 100m Gold in 9.63s!

Usain Bolt of Jamaica repeated his Gold Medal finish in the 100 meter dash at the Beijing Olympics by doing so again at the XXX Olympiad in London, with a winning time of 9.63 seconds, slower than his world record of 9.58 seconds, but  faster than his winning time of 9.69 seconds from four years ago.

Second was Yohan Blake (also of Jamaica) in  a personal best time of 9.75 second, while American Justin Gatlin edged countryman (and former World Record holder) Tyson Gay 1/100th of a second to win the Bronze medal with a time of 9.79s.

Teenager Wins 400m Gold Medal for Grenada

Kirani James, left, beat World Champion LaShawn Merritt at the tape in the 400m
Photo credit: Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Somehow I missed this amazing story from two weeks ago. An 18-year-old boy named Kirani James from my home island countryof Grenada (which has a population of just over 100,000 people, smaller than most cities in the United States) won the 400m gold at the recent World Track and Field Championships by beating an Olympic champion in the event!

But that was not the only amazing story of this 400 meter race. Another Grenadian runner, Rondell Bartholomew, placed sixth and there were twin brothers from Belgium that finished 3rd and 5th!

The Guardian has a great article on the race:

It takes something special to steal the headlines from an Olympic champion who has just returned from a 21-month ban because he accidentally ingested steroids while taking penis-enlargement pills. And Kirani James did just that. He beat LaShawn Merritt, who returned to the track after his suspension in July, in one of the great 400m races in the history of the world championships. James turns 19 on Saturday and his life is never going to be the same again.

If James's name had not been noted before he ran in Daegu, that is hardly surprising. The world 400m champion has run only four professional races in his career, three of them in the past three days. People who like easy labels are already calling him the new Usain Bolt but that does not quite fit. He is neither as flamboyant nor as fast. The first of those differences is not going to change but the second surely will.

The race had the kind of finish that is going to be rerun in the highlights reels for years to come. Merritt came into the home straight with a lead but James ran him down with 50 metres to go. The two were shoulder to shoulder as they came up to the line but James got himself half a stride in front and won by three hundredths of a second, despite Merritt's despairing dip of the head. His winning time of 44.60sec was a personal best, though it is unlikely to be so for long. The Belgian Kevin Borlée took bronze, completing a colourful cast of medal winners. His identical twin, Jonathan, was fifth.

James comes from Grenada and is their first world championship medallist. When he was 16 he was running the 400m in 45.24, a time that would easily have been good enough to earn a place in the final here. 

Now, that is great writing, and a great story. Congratulations, Kirani! (About those Belgian Borlée twins, expect to see them again on this blog in the near future, as either Eye Candy or Celebrity Friday).

Caster Semenya Reported To Be Intersex

Rod 2.0 and Joe.My.God are both reporting that South African track & field phenom Caster Semenya who won the 800m gold medal in Berlin last month has been revealed to be intersex. There has been an ongoing controversy and public furor over the supposed "gender testing" of the South African athlete due to her curiously "gender inappropriate" physique and appearance. Now, the reasons have been discovered:

Tests conducted during the world athletics championships in Berlin last month, where Semenya's gender became the subject of heated debate following her victory in the 800m, revealed evidence she is a hermaphrodite, someone with both male and female sexual characteristics.

Semenya, 18, has three times the amount of testosterone that a "normal'' female would have. According to a source closely involved with the Semenya examinations IAAF testing, which included various scans, has revealed she has internal testes - the male sexual organs which produce testosterone.

[...]

When quizzed by South African magazine You on the gender issue, Semenya said: "I see it all as a joke, it doesn't upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I'm proud of myself. I don't want to talk about the tests - I'm not even thinking about them.''

The use of the word "hermaphrodite" to describe people with both male and female biological characteristics is considered offensive, similar to the use of the word "homosexual" to describe people sexually attracted to people of the same sex. Joe.My.God has posted useful information on the topic from the Intersex Society of North America:

RELATED: The Intersex Society of North America notes that although the term "hermaphrodite" is commonly used to describe intersex people (and this is already happening with Semenya), hermaphrodite literally means "fully male and fully female," which is a physical impossibility. "Intersex" is the proper way to describe a person who may have one or several of a very broad range of atypical gender characteristics, ranging from ambiguous or mixed external genitalia, internal conditions (as in Semenya's case), or an atypical chromosonal makeup. Some intersex characteristics are extremely rare, others occur much more frequently, and studies indicate that some aspect of being intersex occurs in about 1 out of 100 people.

Usain Bolt Breaks 200M World Record (Again)!

Following up on his stunning 9.58s turn in the 100m dash earlier in the week at the World Championships in Berlin, 22-year-old Jamaican track and field sensation Usain Bolt broke his own world record in the 200m by running a ridiculous 19.19s, again .11s better than the previous world record.

Bolt humiliated the field, winning by .62s ahead of second-place Alonso Edward of Panama (19.81s) and the pulchritudinous Wallace Spearmon of the United States (19.85s).

In his last 5 championship races, Usain Bolt has set 5 world records.

Intersection of Gender and Race: Caster Semenya

The gold medallist in the 800m at the World Track & Field Championships in Berlin is 18-year-old Caster Semenya of South Africa. Semenya demolished the field in the finals of the 800m by running 1:55.45, more than two seconds ahead of the defending world champion Janeth Jepkosgei of Kenya.

Afterwards, there were questions raised about the winner's gender:

Semenya, a muscular 5 feet 7 inches and 140 pounds, was an unknown before she ran a blistering time at the Africa Junior Championships three weeks ago. She did not speak to media after the race.

[...]

Weiss said it could take several weeks to get the results of the investigation, which he said included testing of Semenya in both South Africa and Berlin. Without that evidence, the IAAF could not keep Semenya from running here.

"We entered Caster as a woman and we want to keep it that way," South African team manager Phiwe Mlangeni-Tsholetsane told the Associated Press. "Our conscience is clear in terms of Semenya."

The issue of gender testing is so controversial that the International Olympic Committee suspended widespread gender testing in 1999, reserving the right to do psychological, gynecological and chromosome investigations "if there is a valid suspicion," IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch said in an e-mail.

Of course, what they are actually talking about is sex, not gender. Gender consists of the socially constructed meanings, characteristics and associations with the state of being male or female. Sex is the state of being either male or female. Neither are binaries, they exist on a spectrum.

Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times goes on to summarize the controversy over the determination of sex in track and field over time.

There have been controversies about gender in track and field for several decades.

An autopsy after her 1980 death found that Stella Walsh, who won the 1932 Olympic gold medal in the 100 meters for Poland, had male genitals and mixed male and female chromosomes. She retained her gold medal and a silver she won in 1936.

At least two women have been banned from track and field since 1967 because they failed chromosome tests, although one was reinstated. An Indian distance runner lost a 2006 Asian Games silver medal after failing a gender test.

As recently as the 1987 Mediterranean Games in Syria, only a visual inspection was used for gender verification. By that time, mouth swabs to reveal chromosomes were the accepted method, but questions about their accuracy led to the IOC ban on using them exclusively to determine gender

How do you think the line should be drawn between "male" and "female"?

Usain Bolt DESTROYS 100M World Record: 9.58s!

Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who won the 100m and 200m Gold medals in world record time (19.30s and 9.69s) at the Beijing Olympics one year ago shattered his own record in the 100m dash with a staggering 9.58s run yesterday at the World Championships in Berlin. See the video above.

Tyson Gay, the top American sprinter, ran a career-best 9.71s, the third-fastest time in history, but even that time would not have beaten Bolt's time from last year, and was nowhere close to the Jamaican 22-year-old's stunning mark of 9.58s, a full .11 second faster than the previous world record. The largest delta (or change) in the history of digital record keeping which began in 1977.

Hat/tip Rod 2.0