And Jones was right. She could have won, and she was about to - not just holding a lead but adding to it when she came to the ninth of 10 hurdles Tuesday.
Alas, her foot slammed into that barrier instead of clearing it. The next thing Jones knew, she was struggling to keep her balance rather than smoothly sailing across the finish line.
Jones dropped from first to seventh behind unlikely champion Dawn Harper of the United States, then dropped to her knees in despair, folding her body to the track and resting her head on her hands. There she stayed, all alone, for a few minutes.
“You hit a hurdle about twice a year where it affects your race,” said Jones, an indoor world championship who came in with the year’s best time. “It’s just a shame that it happened on the biggest race of my life.”
Sanya Richards also was supposed to wear a gold medal for the U.S.
Everyone in the Bird’s Nest knew so after she was touted over the PA system before the 400-meter final as “No. 1 in the world the last three years.”
Richards was also about to win - taking a lead into the final 80 meters. That’s when she began slowing and was passed, not once, but twice.
Richards blamed her fade on a tightening right hamstring, and although she still wound up with a bronze behind Britain’s Christine Ohuruogu and Jamaica’s Shericka Williams, she hardly looked thrilled on the podium, sighing after receiving her flowers. Minutes later, she was sobbing into a cell phone, sitting on the floor in a hallway beneath the stands.
“I knew that gold was mine,” she said. “I was already getting up and elated coming off the turn, because I know how my races usually go. I just had a really tough break on that one.”
Tough breaks are becoming the norm in an Olympic track and field meet in which little has gone according to plan for the U.S.
Instead, victories on Tuesday seemed to be reserved for athletes who barely made it to the Summer Games.
Harper, for example, grabbed the last spot at the U.S. trials by 0.007 second. But on the biggest stage of all, she was good enough for gold, windmilling both arms as she finished in 12.54 seconds. That wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Jones’ best time this year.
“This is a kid nobody knew,” said Harper’s coach, Bob Kersee. “Now she’s an Olympic gold medalist.”
Ohuruogu, the 2007 world champion who won in 49.62 seconds, was cleared in November to compete at the games when she won her appeal against a lifetime Olympic ban for missing doping tests. The British Olympic Association automatically bars any athlete found guilty of a doping violation from competing in any future Olympics. But a sports arbitration panel overturned that.
She was suspended for a year by UK Athletics for missing three out-of-competition drug tests between October 2005 and July 2006 - the first British track athlete punished for missing three tests. She said she missed the testers when her training schedules were changed at late notice.
Asked whether her medal might be tainted, Ohuruogu replied, “Why should it be spoiled, unless someone tries to spoil it for me?”
Someone else who barely made it to Beijing but became a gold medalist Tuesday is men’s high jumper Andrey Silnov of Russia. He failed to qualify for his country’s team at its Olympic trials but turned in a season-best performance of 7 feet, 9¾ inches (2.38 meters) last month.
So the Russian federation ordered a “jump-off” between him and another athlete, and afterward, Silnov was put on the team.
Other golds Tuesday went to Rashid Ramzi of Bahrain in the 1,500 meters, and Gerd Kanter of Estonia in the discus throw.
The most anticipated of today’s finals is the men’s 200 meters, in which Jamaica’s Usain Bolt will try to add that gold to his world-record-breaking title in the 100. Success would make him the first man since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win both sprints at an Olympic Games.
Bolt, Crawford and Wallace Spearmon all made it easily through the semifinals of the 200, in which Bolt will be chasing Michael Johnson’s 12-year-old record of 19.32 seconds.
The Jamaica-U.S. sprint rivalry also is alive in the women’s 200, where Americans Allyson Felix, Muna Lee and Marshevet Hooker qualified for the semifinals, along with a trio from the Caribbean island.
Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merritt advanced to the men’s 400 final, and David Oliver and Dayron Robles moved on to the semifinals of the men’s 110 hurdles.
