The National’s sports team is helping you keep up to date with what is happening in Rio while most of us in the UAE were sleeping. Here is today’s Daily 5.
1 Peak speed
I’m gonna go out on the limb. I do this knowing I’m a young man and I have many, many years for this take to age poorly, but I’m going with it anyway.
Usain Bolt is the ceiling on sprinting.
I always wonder when the Olympics roll around when athletics records will generally stop being broken. When we, collectively as a species, will have finally gotten as fast as is humanly possible.
I have come to think we are already there. That “as fast as is humanly possible” is Usain Bolt and there is no more faster coming along.
Not in 10 years. Not in 25. Not in 50 or 100 or 200. I cannot conceive of how a human could possibly be any faster, any more dominant a sprinter, than we have watched Usain Bolt be for the last decade.
This is it, folks. This is as fast as we're getting. Like the long jump, with a 25-years-dormant world record that is seemingly set in stone unless humanity reconfigures its legs, Usain Bolt has come along and settled sprinting.
The Jamaican has finished the “triple triple”. A trio of 100m, 200m and 4x100m sweeps, from Beijing eight years ago to London 2012 to Rio on Friday night.
“I hope I’ve set the bar high enough that no one can do it again,” Bolt said.
So here it is. I’m calling it: He has. No one is coming along to match the “triple triple”, no one is coming along to break his 9.58s 100m record. No one is coming along to beat his 19.190 200m record.
Usain Bolt has won sprinting.
Like I said, I understand how foolhardy it is (especially in athletics) to stand and say “yes, this is it”. I understand how history may look back and find it laughably shortsighted. But I at least want history to understand how seriously impossible it seems, right in the here and now, to imagine there could ever come along someone faster.
Absent unforeseeable advances in science (faster shoes?) or rules changes (the legal doping revolution of 2032?), this is as fast as we’re going to see a person run with their own two genetically-given legs. I firmly believe that.
“I’ve proven to the world I’m the greatest,” Bolt said on Friday night, “so it’s mission accomplished, pretty much”.
Usain Bolt turns 30 on Sunday. My hunch is when he turns 90, that statement will still be true.
• Read more: Usain Bolt - 'I've proven to the world I'm the greatest'
2 Good bye, doofus
A word on Ryan Lochte, before his whole stupid saga is embarrassingly brushed under history’s rug.
Do you have any idea how many Olympic medals he's won? How honest-to-goodness great a simmer he has been?
Why should you? Who even cares anymore?
Ryan Lochte could have gone down as a fantastic swimmer, a great American Olympian, and lived a quiet, comfortable life like, say, (checking Wikipedia) Don Schollander.
Don Schollander won five golds in his career, at the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. According to his Wikipedia page, "Schollander resides with his wife, Cheryl, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he runs Schollander Development, a real estate development company. His gold medals are on display to the public at a Bank of America branch location in downtown Lake Oswego."
That sounds perfectly pleasant. There probably won’t be any Bank of America branches ever displaying Ryan Lochte’s medals.
Maybe there’s something to be said for being memorable, for going down as more than just a great athlete with an infrequently-clicked-upon Wikipedia page.
Ryan Lochte can rest easy knowing he will be remembered for more than sitting just below Michael Phelps on the list of Olympic medallists in swimming (total).
He needn’t have even bothered winning those medals, in fact. For he won’t be remembered as a swimmer at all.
He’ll instead be remembered as maybe the most unfortunate doofus ever elevated by the accident of athletic acumen.
As the Washington Post's Sally Jenkins so perfectly put it, "the dumbest bell that ever rang".
• More: Read the full round-up
3 Other highlights from Day 14
• Great Britain continued their sterling Olympics run, with their women's hockey team taking gold against the favoured Dutch.
• Carolina Marin of Spain became the first non-Asian badminton champion at an Olympics, beating India's PV Sindhu, who herself became the first Indian woman to get a silver medal.
• Germany won the women’s Olympic football title, with their men set to try and make it a double against hosts Brazil in tonight’s final. The Germans apparently love playing on Brazilian soil.
• The United States leads in the medal count with 105 (38 gold), followed in golds by Great Britain with 24 (60 overall) and China overall with 65 (22 gold). We're keeping track of all the gold medal winners.
4. Tweet of the day
Lydia Ko sank a hole-in-one at the Olympics. She’s awesome.
But when she does, it's at the Olympics.https://t.co/g5NZs3iMq7 pic.twitter.com/54IN599Hab
5. Video of the day
Seriously look at that. Nobody’s ever beating that. C’mon.
