Usain Bolt will race the 200m final on Thursday after comfortably winning his semi-final, but there was no place for American rival Justin Gatlin as he failed to qualify.

Gatlin, who has served two doping bans, tied up late in his semi-final, blaming a stiff ankle as he finished third in 20.13sec to miss out on one of the eight final berths.

It was a different story for Bolt, however, who clocked a season’s best of 19.78sec in the next step on his quest for an unprecedented sprint “triple triple”.

“I wasn’t fully surprised,” Bolt said of Gatlin’s elimination.

“I thought he would have made it. But I could tell in the 100m he was feeling the pain and he was slowing down.”

“It’s just the fact you’re getting old. To double at a championship where the young guys are stepping up is really hard.”

Gatlin, who won 100m silver behind Bolt at the weekend, explained that he had not fully recovered from rolling his right ankle in late November.

“It’s been flaring up this season. Tonight it got really stiff on me in the warm-up area and I wasn’t able to properly warm up where I needed to warm up at,” he said.

“Having that lane three coming off the turn, I felt pain in the last 20 metres, I looked over and tried to hold on and do the best I could.”

“I’m just glad I was able to walk off the track without a real harmful injury and be able to rest myself, get the treatment I need for my ankle and come out here and help my teammates in the 4x100m relay.”

The towering Bolt eased up a full 40 metres from the line in his semi, to advance along with Canadian Andre De Grasse, setting a national record of 19.80sec as the second automatic qualifier.

“It means I’m definitely on the right track,” Bolt said.

“I felt energetic and everything was going smooth. Hopefully I’ll get a top lane tomorrow,” he said, adding his preference would be lane six or seven where the bend is not perceived to be too sharp.

“It’s always better for me because I’m taller.” Bolt added that he felt his own world record of 19.19sec, set when winning the 2009 world title in Berlin, could be under threat.

“I definitely think I can try for the world record, I definitely feel that,” he said.

“But it’s all about executing right, running the corner efficiently, then coming into the straight and just running the perfect race.

“I don’t get over-confident, I’ll come out and execute.” Bolt joked that De Grasse pushing him through to the finish line was “really unnecessary”.

“I don’t know what he was trying to do. I told him to ease up but he wanted to run to the end. He had something to prove I guess.”

“But he’s a young kid and he’s great and he’s got a lot of talent so I’m looking forward to a great talent in the finals,” he said.

Bolt won a third successive 100m title on Sunday to set up his bid to repeat his haul of three gold medals in the 100, 200 and 4x100m relay at both the Beijing and London Olympics in 2008 and 2012 respectively.

Gatlin looked uncomfortable throughout his race.

The US challenge will now fall to Lashawn Merritt, the 400m specialist who clocked 19.94sec to win his heat ahead of France’s Christophe Lemaitre.

Gatlin added, however, that his Olympic days might not be over, citing the in-form 40-year-old sprinter Kim Collins with one eye on the Tokyo Games in four years’ time.

“There are a lot of athletes who only make it to one Olympics,” he said.

“I’ve been to three in the span of 12 years. It’s been an honour to come out here. Someone like Kim Collins give me inspiration for Tokyo!”

Also qualifying for the final are Panama’s Alonso Edward, Briton Adam Gemeili, Azerbai-born Turk Ramil Guliyev and European champion Churandy Martina of the Netherlands.

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

AFP, Reuters, The Straits Times

Brazilian police pulled two US Olympic swimmers off a plane about to leave the country for questioning in a row over their claim to have been victims of an armed mugging, US officials said Wednesday.

“We can confirm that Jack Conger and Gunnar Bentz were removed from their flight to the United States by Brazilian authorities,” said Patrick Sandusky, spokesman for the US Olympic Committee.

The two were with star US swimmer Ryan Lochte and another squad member, James Feigen, when they said they were robbed at gunpoint. A Brazilian judge ordered a probe saying their story is full of inconsistencies.

Globo, a leading Brazilian news organisation, posted a video online showing the two swimmers walking into a police station.

The G1 news site, which is part of Globo, reported that Bentz and Conger were detained for questioning and that Feigen had been taken in earlier while still in the airport.

Police did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

Lochte is believed to be already in the United States, having left before the Brazilian authorities ordered the swimmers’ questioning.

Earlier, Judge Keyla Blank “issued warrants for searches and the seizure of the passports for the US swimmers,” a statement from her office said.

“With this, they are banned from leaving the country,” the statement said.

The court order was the latest twist in a story of a supposedly terrifying incident that embarrassed Rio authorities and ramped up the fear factor for hundreds of thousands of tourists in Rio at South America’s first Olympics.

Now Brazilian officials are suggesting that the US swimmers may have made up their account – and could face charges for filing a false report.

Lochte says that he and three team-mates were held up by muggers posing as police as they left a late night party in central Rio.

At first the International Olympic Committee denied that anything had happened. Lochte, however, gave interviews describing an incident in detail and Brazilian Olympic authorities later issued a public apology for the security slip up.

With some 85,000 police and soldiers guarding the Olympics – twice the number used in London – the apparently high-profile crime touched a nerve in Rio.

In addition to multiple incidents of thefts from Olympic athletes or media, a Portuguese government minister was mugged in the swish Leblon district.

Lochte said he had a gun put to his forehead in the robbery, when the swimmers’ taxi was pulled over by criminals who forced them to lie on the ground and stole money and other items.

“The guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, ‘Get down,'” Lochte said afterward.

“He took our money, he took my wallet – he left my cell phone, he left my credentials.”

However, Olympic officials have said police are still looking for key witnesses, including the driver of the cab the swimmers said they had been in.

Police on Wednesday yet again issued an appeal for the driver to contact them.

Blank’s office said the judge was probing “possible inconsistencies in the swimmers’ stories”.

These included different accounts of how many assailants there were.

Another point raising doubts over the stories was their behaviour, caught on security cameras, as they returned to their hotel after the supposed robbery, the judge said.

“It’s noticeable that the victims arrived back physically and mentally unshaken, even joking with each other,” the judge said.

The video in question, posted on Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid website, shows the four swimmers passing through an X-ray machine, taking what could be wallets or cellphones from their pockets.

At one moment Lochte playfully hits a team mate with his Olympic accreditation.

Otherwise, the clip shows little out of the ordinary.

RIO DE JANEIRO-The 50-meter Olympic freestyle is an all-out sprint that confers upon its winner the title of fastest swimmer in the world.

But a disturbing question is arising about the 50-meter competitions just completed here at the Rio Games: Did a current favour athletes on one side of the pool?

Three scientists who previously published peer-reviewed work showing that a current influenced 50-meter races at the 2013 world championships say that the same problem appears to have existed in the Olympic pool in Rio.

Led by Joel Stager, director of Indiana University’s Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming, the three researchers say that Olympic results this month suggest that a current boosted 50-meter competitors in the higher-numbered lanes of the eight-lane pool.

As evidence, they note that of the eight men and eight women who swam fast enough during the 50-meter semifinals to qualify for the final, all but one swam in lanes 4 through 8.

Moreover, athletes who swam in lanes 5 through 8 during preliminaries or semifinals and moved to lanes 1 through 4 for later heats got slower.

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AFP, Reuters, The Straits Times

They posted times about a half per cent slower in the subsequent round-even though pace tends to quicken as events progress.

Of the three male and three female medalists in the 50 freestyle finals, five swam in lanes 4 through 8. The exception was American Anthony Ervin, who won the 50-free gold medal swimming in lane 3. Pernille Blume of Denmark won the women’s 50 free in lane 4.

“It’s a big deal. This is horrific,” said Stager, whose co-researchers were Chris Brammer, a doctoral candidate in exercise physiology at Indiana University, and Eastern Michigan University professor Andrew Cornett.

Officials at FINA, swimming’s world governing body, said they were reviewing the analysis.

Read the full article here.

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