Lamont Marcell Jacobs: From the hunter to the hunted

Lamont Marcell Jacobs, the first sprint king in a post-Usain Bolt world, will have a target on his back when he makes a long-awaited return to the track next month. What has the double Olympic champion been up to and how will the erstwhile underdog handle the pressure of being chased?

The fastest human being in the world — there is a magical ring to the words often used to anoint the men’s 100m champion at the Olympics. It’s a heavy honour to bear. Nobody has worn it as lightly as the great Usain Bolt did during his glittering career. With an unprecedented hat-trick of 100m-200m doubles at the Games, from 2008 to 2016, Bolt did things that had until then existed only in fantasy. A legend in his lifetime, it seemed his era would never end. But nobody, not even Bolt, can outrun Father Time, and so, in Tokyo last year, the world awaited a new king.

Lamont Marcell Jacobs was not the first name that came up in discussions among athletics fans who attempted to predict the identity of Bolt’s successor as the 100m champion. After all, the Texas-born Italian sprinter had never gone under 10 seconds until 2021. But after USA’s Trayvon Bromell, the favourite, exited in the semifinals, Jacobs surged to victory in a European record time of 9.80 seconds, announcing himself on the world’s biggest stage in some style. For good measure, the then 26-year-old added the 4x100m relay gold to his collection, silencing, at least temporarily, the critics who claimed that Jacobs was no more than a flash in the pan.

The world at large has not clapped eyes on the double Olympic champion since that golden week last August. He decided not to run until he was certain he would be at his best the next time he competed. “It’s not a simple decision,” he said in an interview on Rai 1 public television last year when he announced he would take a break until 2022. “I am the first to want to compete every week, but you get to a certain point in which you realise that it does not end here, in the sense that this is only a great starting point. Every time I race I want to raise the bar.” Jacobs also spoke of “the accumulated fatigue of the Olympics as well as a knee problem”.