By Yavuz Yavuz
Women’s 400m hurdles was the stage for the biggest match-up of Paris 2024, as it was set to bring together Sydney McLaughling-Levrone and Femke Bol, the only two women to ever dip under 51 seconds, for the first time in nearly two years. Everyone thought McLaughlin-Levrone looked to be a step ahead for the gold medal, but Femke Bol would lay down a serious challenge. Bol clocked 50.95 this summer, to McLaughlin-Levrone’s staggering world record of 50.65, which would without doubt improve in a race against the world’s best.
Furthermore, while everyone was aware of McLaughlin-Levrone’s lethal pace, they also thought that Femke Bol would be hard to break. She was not the upcoming sensation who trailed behind McLaughlin-Levrone and Dalilah Muhammad three years ago, she was a legend who made a 400m dash-hurdles-relay triple at the 2022 European Championships. She was the impeccable relay runner who brought the Netherlands from fourth place to a first ever 4x400 gold medal at the Olympics a few nights ago. She just couldn’t break.
But she did. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone was just unreachable tonight as she cleared the first five hurdles in only 22.02 seconds (as opposed to the 22.45 she ran while breaking her last world record). In the end, she was alone in the camera shot as she stopped the clock at 50.37, setting the sixth world record of her career by an improvement of 0.28 seconds. This also meant that McLaughlin-Levrone became the first athlete to ever defend an Olympic women’s 400m hurdles title.
Femke Bol, on the other hand, began to lose rhythm as she approached the eighth hurdle, and was eventually surpassed by Anna Cockrell to settle for an individual bronze once more at the Olympic Games. In the end, Cockrell’s time was 51.87 to Bol’s 52.15, which meant she was now the holder of the third best time of the toplist of the event, as well as the third woman ever to dip under 52 seconds in 400m hurdles.
TEBOGO GOES INTO HISTORY BOOKS
Another highly anticipated race of the night was the men’s 200m final, where Letsile Tebogo cruised to a stunning African record of 19.46 seconds, bringing the continent its first ever men’s 200m gold medal. The Botswanan fended off the American threat laid by Kenneth Bednarek, Noah Lyles (who was looking for a 100-200 double in Paris but later revealed that he contracted COVID-19 two days before the race), and Erriyon Knighton, as the trio took the second, third, and fourth spots respectively.
On the field, world silver-medallist Tara Davis-Woodhall kept Malaika Mihambo from being the first ever athlete to win two consecutive women’s long jump gold medals in the history of the Olympic Games. With a jump of 7.05 at her second attempt she was comfortably placed at the first place, then she extended this by five centimetres two leaps later. While Germany’s Mihambo tested seven metres with a 6.98 at her fifth attempt, that was the furthest she could get. Jasmine Moore, the bronze-medallist, made history as she stood on both triple jump and long jump podiums in Paris, being only the second woman to achieve the feat at the Olympics after Tatyana Lebedeva in Athens 2004.
Men’s javelin throw final witnessed a showdown between Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem and India’s Neeraj Chopra, as Nadeem threw farther than Andreas Thorkildsen’s Olympic record from 2008 twice to win the gold medal. The 92.97 on his second attempt was the mark of the winner that brought Pakistan its first ever athletics medal at the Olympic Games. Chopra, the defending gold-medallist, on the other hand, made a single valid shot at his second attempt and the 89.45 metres that he landed the javelin at was enough for a silver medal. Anderson Peters won bronze with a throw of 88.54 metres, which sealed the first Olympic podium of his career and Grenada’s fifth ever medal at the Olympics.
The night capped off with men’s 110m hurdles race, where Grant Holloway proved once more that he is far better than the rest of the world with a time of 12.99. USA, having won nearly %70 of all 110m hurdles gold medals, returned to the top of the podium after 12 years. In the meantime, while Daniel Roberts won silver, Rasheed Broadbell became the bronze-medallist, bringing Jamaica its second track medal of Paris 2024.
