The world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt, has won the 100m race at the World Athletics Championship in Beijing, China.
The Jamaian, who had been plagued with injury almost all year, beat off stiff competition from America’s Justin Gatlin to take the gold medal at the meet.
According to The Guardian, Gatlin had been the undisputed king of sprinting for about two years, as well as athletics’ most controversial character, but Bolt stole the show from him unexpectedly by the narrowest of margins.
Usain Bolt put an injury plagued season behind him to beat Justin Gatlin to gold at the World Athletics Championships in Beijing. Photograph: Diego Azubel/EPA
The American is famous for failing two doping tests and also for his explosive starts, but Bolt, despite his almost perfect runs, tends to rise from his blocks like a man who has slept on a rock hard mattress.
In this keenly-contested race between the pair, Gatlin lost his balance while Bolt kept his nerve and in the end, a width of vest separated them with Bolt winning in 9.79sec, from Gatlin in 9.80.
Canadian Andre De Grasse and the 19-year-old American Trayvon Bromell shared the bronze medal in 9.92.
Both men were taking the race to the end until Gatlin, who has run faster than 9.80 four times this year, bowed out when the pressure was on, while Bolt, left the stadium sporting the broadest smile.
The Guardian recalls also that it was in the Bird’s Nest in 2008 that he first announced himself as a global superstar, by winning Olympic 100m and 200m gold in world record times, and after enduring some difficult years, he returned to the same venue and found his wings.
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