Olympic Daily Dispatch Day 8: Passing The Baton

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

Team USA qualified both its men’s and women’s teams to the finals of the 4×100m relay and got very different results. For the third year in a row, the U.S. women took home the gold in a global championship, overcoming a few shaky exchanges with talent, quick thinking, and small adjustments. Sha’Carri Richardson even had time to stare down the silver-medal team from Great Britain for a solid 10 meters on the homestretch. 

The men… had a very different story. Their woes started before the race even began, with 100m Olympic champion Noah Lyles withdrawing from the team after coming down with COVID shortly before the 200m final. The adjusted relay took to the track and faced even more problems almost immediately: second leg Kenny Bednarek took off way early and had to slow to a jog to grab the baton from Christian Coleman, then by the time the stick got around to another bobbled handoff to anchor leg Fred Kerley, Team USA was way back in 6th with no shot at a medal. It didn’t end up mattering, because Bednarek received the baton outside the exchange zone. For the fifth Olympics in a row, the U.S. was listed as a DQ or DNF in the results.

By the end of the evening, however, the relay theatrics were a distant memory in the minds of Team USA as Rai Benjamin finally got a gold medal in the 400m hurdles to round out a collection that already includes three silvers and a bronze. Benjamin was behind reigning World/Olympic champ Karsten Warholmthrough 7 of 10 hurdles but dug deep for another gear to separate significantly from the field in the final 100 meters. He tied his season’s best 46.46 in the process, handily defeating both Warholm and Brazilian Alison dos Santos for the first time in a championship setting. While Warholm still holds the world record, Benjamin now has 5 of the 10 fastest 400m hurdles ever run — Warholm has 4, and dos Santos has 1. 

Kenyan fans had plenty to cheer about too as Beatrice Chebet completed the 5000m/10,000m double with a blazing-fast 57-second final lap to close out a 30:43.25 victory. Chebet’s had maybe the best 2024 of any distance runner in the world: She defended her World XC title in February, broke the 10,000m world record in May, and won her first and second Olympic gold medals in August. Italian Nadia Battocletti clocked her second national record of the week and won the first Olympic 10,000m medal in the country’s history ins econd. Behind her, Sifan Hassan picked up her second bronze of the week only 36 hours before the most audacious leg of her Olympic triple — racing the marathon final on tired legs. 

The women’s shot put final was full of topsy-turvy outcomes as World Indoor champion Sarah Mittonfinished dead last in the final, 2x World outdoor champion Chase Jackson didn’t even make the final, and Tokyo Olympic champion Lijao Gong wasn’t even the top Chinese finisher. Instead, it was relatively unheralded German Yemisi Ogunyele who moved from second to first in her final throw, nailing 20.00 meters on the dot to take the gold.

By the time you’re reading this, the men’s marathon will have just wrapped up and Ethiopia’s last-minute replacement runner Tamirat Tola is your Olympic gold medalist in championship record fashion, running 2:06:26. Brit Emile Cairess impressed with a 4th-place finish and the Americans did well to run close to their personal bests, with Conner Mantz finishing 8th in 2:08:12 and Clayton Young 9th in 2:08:44. Hope you got up at 2am E.T. to watch the action! 

We’ve got one more day of action on the track to savor the best of what Olympic track and field has to offer. Faith Kipyegon will go for three straight 1500m titles against one of the fastest fields ever assembled. The men’s 5000m is anyone’s guess, but Jakob Ingebrigtsen will surely not want to leave Paris without a gold medal. The men’s 800m could yield some historically fast times, like it has all season, and one of the deepest events in track and field, the women’s 100m hurdles, comes down to an exciting conclusion. On the field, an injury-plagued high jump field battles for the medals in the men’s final, and the women’s javelin throw is a wide open battle. 

Then we’ll wrap up the day with the 4×400m relays, with Team USA favored to add two more gold medals to its collection before things wrap up. The women’s marathon is early Sunday morning, so the Olympics are not quite done yet, but the last few events in the Stade de France will be taking place over the course of the afternoon and evening, so don’t miss it. 

You can find a full schedule and live results here.

Just like the men’s race, the women’s 400m final was historically fast and historically deep. For the first time in history, three women broke 49 seconds in the same race — and doing it in the Olympic final meant you had to run a 48 to earn a medal this year. A fitting requirement for a blazing-fast year that’s seen 5 different athletes break 49 seconds an incredible 17 run sub-50. 

While Marileidy Paulino had won gold in Budapest last year, she was the reigning Olympic silver medalist from 2021 and surely wanted to bring home another gold for the Dominican Republic. Paulino used her legendary strength down the homestretch to keep a lead over eventual silver medalist Salwa Eid Naser and crossed the line in 48.17 to become the fourth fastest athlete in history in the event. 

European champ Natalia Kaczmarek has two Olympic medals from Polish relays in Tokyo, but she’d never earned an Olympic medal in the open 400m until yesterday. Her 48.98 capped off an excellent season for the 26-year-old that saw her break 49 on three separate occasions after coming into the year with a 49.48 lifetime best. 

Poor Rhasidat Adeleke, who carried the hopes of the nation of Ireland into the final, ran a fantastic 49.28 but only found herself fourth in such a top-heavy field. But the 21-year-old Adeleke will very likely be back in action in tomorrow’s 4×400m, thanks to the heroic efforts of her teammates yesterday morning to get the Irish underdogs into the final.

The decathlon and heptathlon are the most grueling events in track and field — because they’re actually many events all crammed into two days. Multi-eventers tend to compete their full suite of events infrequently, deal with significant injuries regularly, and retire early. It’s hard on the body and the mind to have to specialize in seven (or ten) different disciplines simultaneously and then stay dialed in for 30 hours straight. 

So of course, until yesterday, no athlete had won three Olympic golds in a multi-event. What kind of superhuman could accomplish such a feat? Who could stay in their athletic prime through nine years and who-knows-how-many scrapes, strains, and broken bones, only to compete in an event where two days of work could be derailed by grazing a high jump bar or poorly pacing an 800m? 

Nafi Thiam, that’s who. 

The Belgian phenom won her third Olympic title just 10 days before her 30th birthday, putting up 6,880 big ones to defeat rival Katarina Johnson-Thompson by 36 points. Thiam was the top performer in the high jump, shot put, and javelin, and although she didn’t get a lifetime best in the competition overall, she did summon a PB in the final event of the competition, the 800m, running 2:10.62 to stay just close enough to KJT to defend her lead. 

Thiam has also won the 2017 and 2022 World Championships in between all that Olympic winning, and she’s got three golds at Euros over the same period to boot. That’s a lot of consistent excellence over seven events. The one time Thiam has lost a World title since 2016 was her silver medal performance in Doha in 2019, where it took a lifetime best from Johnson-Thompson to dethrone her. 

For all we know, Thiam has plans to go for four, but on the off chance that this is the last time we see her on the Olympic stage, she deserves our praise and admiration in full force. The heptathlon is one of those weird events that doesn’t quite take center stage for most of the competition, and even during the final 800m, understanding the relative places, times, and point values of the performances they happen asks a lot of viewers. But once you take a moment to step back and appreciate Thiam’s accomplishment for its own enormous magnitude, you realize that, of all the amazing performances thrown down this week, her threepeat might be the most impressive of them all.