Americans Sweep 400 as Relay Teams Go Down
David Neville, Jeremy Wariner and LaShawn Merritt by Carlos Barria/Reuters
Despite picking up six more medals, the U.S. track meet had another rough night Thursday. Both the men's and women's 4x100-meter relay teams bumbled their final exchanges and failed to finish the heats. "Somebody, somewhere has a voodoo doll on the United States," women's anchor
Lauryn Williams told NBC's Bob Neumeier. Back in the studio
Bob Costas summed it up perfectly when he said, "So the U.S. relay teams laying a giant egg in the Bird's Nest."
Earlier, world champion
Allyson Felix was beaten convincingly by Jamaica's Veronica Campbell-Brown in the
women's 200. Campbell-Brown, the defending champion, looked magnificent in running 21.74 seconds, putting her into a tie for eighth on the all-time list. "She jumped on Allyson Felix something awful and it was all downhill from there," NBC's Ato Boldon said. Felix ran a season's best 21.93 but never had the spark she showed in winning the last two world titles.
Another world champion who lost Thursday was
Jeremy Wariner, but he was part of a U.S. sweep of the 400-meter medals. Wariner, who won this event in Athens and has been fairly invincible since then, was "soundly thrashed," as NBC's
Tom Hammond called it, by LaShawn Merritt,
43.75-44.74. David Neville dove to the line to complete the sweep, in 44.80. A steamed Wariner walked away from Neumeier when asked if
his decision to changes coaches earlier this year (
reportedly over money issues) was to blame.
At Chaoyang Park, Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers completed the beach volleyball sweep, pulling out a
three-set victory over Brazil's Marcio Araujo and Fabio Magalhaes.
The Chinese are
thisclose to a sweep of the diving events after Chen Ruolin came from behind to win the
women's platform. The crowd went nuts as the youngster secured China's seventh gold of the Beijing Games. "The 15-year-old thrilled her country with a dive for the ages," said NBC's Ted Robinson. American
Laura Wilkinson, the champion at the 2000 Games, had an emotional goodbye to the sport, finishing ninth. The men's platform concludes the diving competition on Saturday.
BMX, in its Olympic debut, got crammed into a too-brief six-minute window. We saw two thrilling, crash-filled races, won by
France's Anne-Caroline Chausson and
Latvia's Maris Strombergs, but it went by so fast, with no context, that it seemed like an afterthought. Guess NBC needed that time for
Cris Collinsworth's latest pointless "Gosh, I get to be a fan and yap about it" essay, this time on beach volleyball.
