Bryan Clay wins gold, eyes London’s Games for history
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You’d think it’d be enough to win a gold and a silver in Olympic decathlons. Only twice in history had anyone ever won two medals in the event (Britain’s Daley Thompson, Bob Mathias of the U.S. each won gold twice). But now that Glendora’s Bryan Clay has won his two, he is already thinking about 2012 and England and his third. ‘It’s the start of something good and if my body holds up I’m hoping to be capable of doing this again in 2012,’ Clay told the Australian newspaper.
The baby-faced athlete will be 32 in 2012 and seems possible, but as Phil Hersh wrote in today’s Times, it takes a lot more to win a medal in the decathlon than, say, a 100-meter sprint like Jamaican speedster Usain Bolt.
Bolt needed about 2 minutes and 10 seconds of running altogether to win gold medals in the 100, 200 and relay. Clay had endured two 11-hour days of competition to join a line of U.S. decathlon champions that began at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics with Jim Thorpe.
According to the AP, even though Clay became the first American to win the decathlon since Dan O’Brien did it in 1996 in Atlanta, the sport doesn’t capture the attention of the masses the way it did when Bruce Jenner won it in ’76.
The event no longer grabs the headlines back home. Case in point: Clay’s triumph came just minutes before Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell led Jamaica to a world record in the 4x100 relay. When their news conference started, all but a handful of reporters left Clay. ‘I hope the Wheaties box and all those types of things happen,’ he said. ‘I’d love for this to be a spark for the decathlon and bring it back to the forefront of track and field.’
-- Tony Pierce
AP photo