A five-minute burst of action near the backstretch of the Olympic track served up the perfect snapshot of what is going right, and all …
A five-minute burst of action near the backstretch of the Olympic track served up the perfect snapshot of what is going right, and all that is going wrong, for the U.S. track and field team in Tokyo. At one moment in the pole vault pit Thursday night, Katie Nageotte cleared 4.90 meters (16 feet,1 inch) and went running up to the stands to celebrate a gold medal that had looked like a lost cause only an hour earlier. At the next, just as the 400-meter sprinters approached the halfway point, American champion Michael Norman was steaming so far ahead of the competition, it became clear he could not sustain the pace. He didn’t. Norman finished fifth. The U.S. men’s sprinters, once the dominant power across the global track game, left the stadium without having won a single gold medal over the first seven days of the nine-day meet. But Nageotte’s gold, won in a tense back-and-forth with Russian athlete Anzhelika Sidorova, was the third victory in the field for the U.S., two of which have been won by women. With only two days left at Olympic Stadium, what started as anomaly can now be considered a trend: The U.S. women are doing well. The U.S. men are not. The U.S. overall is doing well in field events. It is struggling overall on the track. Other instances that played out Thursday for the Americans: — Grant Holloway, the defending world champion who came.01 seconds short of the world record earlier this summer in the 110-meter hurdles, came.05 short of Jamaica’s Hansle Parchment, who won in 13.09. It was Jamaica’s third Olympic gold medal of the post-Usain Bolt era. — Will Claye, considered as good a bet as any to win with the defending champion, Christian Taylor, on the sideline, finished fourth in triple jump.
