It’s really strange that Lamont Marcel Jacobs can run so fast, because most people slow down as they pass Stadio Paolo Rosi, an imposing running track set among pine trees and surrounded by massive white limestone statues. But different laws apply to Jacobs, as it turned out on Sunday when this until recently unknown Italian became an Olympic champion in the 100 meters out of thin air.
This weekend, it became clear that one of the world’s most celebrated sports competitions was no longer the standard Sunday afternoon show with Jamaican Usain Bolt leading the way. No, the king’s number suddenly turns out to be an open battle between two unknowns, with the most victorious at the end. Even his opponents admitted after the race that until recently they didn’t really know who Jacobs was.
As the Italian newspaper reported, “His name is Lamont Marcel Jacobs.” Republic He introduced the new national pride to his readers on Monday. To immediately add, “But that American name means nothing. He doesn’t even speak English! And anyway, who cares that his ID says he was born in El Paso, Texas, on September 26, 1994? The wind brought him to us, to Desenzano del Garda.” , Italy.
It is true that Jacobs was born in the United States. After all, his father, who, like himself, is called Lamont Marcel Jacobs, is an American soldier who fell in love with his Italian mother during his deployment to Italy. However, when the two moved to America together and had a baby, his father was sent again just a month after his birth, this time to South Korea. His mother decided not to attend, after which the mother and son returned to Italy.
“When people ask me who my father is, I usually answer that I don’t know,” Jacobs said in an interview about his relationship with his father last month. In the same interview, to finally clear any doubts about where his heart is, he said he feels 100 percent Italian, only because he really needs Google Translate to have a good English conversation.
Not having a relationship with the father
By the way, this flawed relationship with his father appeared on Monday in many Italian articles that tried to explain the sudden success of the feud. Doping, after all a substance widely used both in Italian sport and in the running world, has not been mentioned in any Italian sports newspaper as a possible explanation for his stormy development. However, the same conversation that Jacobs had with the press after his race victory surfaced all over the place, where he said: ‘A year ago my mental trainer said: ‘If you want to run faster, you have to come to terms with your dad. I did, and this convergence has given me the final push to give these Olympics more.
However, if you delve a bit more into Jacobs’ athletic past, you’ll see that it wasn’t his recent reconciliation with his father that was the turning point in his career, but his decision to focus definitively on running. Jacobs has spent most of his athletic career in the long jump. In 2013, he actually broke an Italian youth record that had been in place since 1976, only taking sprints to improve his career. But when his development started to falter in recent years, and the 2019 European Futsal Championship was a disaster for him, he decided to hold off the long jump from now on after an intense night of crying. From now on it will just be a runner.
He moved to Rome with his wife and children so that he could train daily with his running coach at Stadio Paolo Rosi. It turned out to be a golden opportunity because in nearly every race he’s run since then, he’s broken his best. In 2019 he achieved 10.03 seconds in the 100 metres. At the beginning of this year, that time dropped to 9.95. In May that number became 9.94, and during the semi-finals in Tokyo, he again ran 10th fastest.
42.9 km/h
On Sunday, thanks to a top speed of 42.9 kilometers per hour – speeds Italians until recently only knew about cycling – he hit his fastest time ever: 9.80. Until Sunday, no Italian had made it to the Olympic final of the 100-meter sprint. On Sunday, Marcel Jacobs set the fastest time ever to win an Olympic final, after Usain Bolt.
“I may have changed my major, but my dream has always remained the same,” he said shortly after the gold race.
And so the old adage that everything in Italy is slow, except for conversations, can finally be tossed in the trash after 45 solid steps on Sunday, because Lamont Marcel Jacobs, that archetypal Italian who calls his mother every day and rides in a red Fiat 500. He is the fastest man in the world.
Tv fanatic. Freelance thinker. Social media enthusiast. Total bacon lover. Communicator.