Sprinters will have to run very quickly in Tokyo to make those absent forget.

In the men's final over 100 meters, which will be held this Sunday (14:50 p.m. CEST in the FAZ live ticker for the Olympics, on ZDF and on Eurosport), 24 hours after the women's race, big names are missing. 

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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Usain Bolt, who became Olympic champion in the 100 and 200 meters in Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 and from his three successes with the relay still has two gold medals.

He has left memories of a charming, dancing superstar in athletics, his world records and the impression that no one fits in his footsteps.

The 2017 world champions from London, Justin Gatlin, and from Doha 2019, Christian Coleman, are absent;

39-year-old Gatlin, booed as a dopper by the audience when he won the title, hobbled injured in eighth place in the American trials, Coleman is banned because he was absent from a few doping controls.

Convincing comeback

The flamboyant Noah Lyles failed in his attempt to master the 100 as well as the 200 meters. Favorite is Trayvon Bromell, winner of the trials. He recorded 9.77 seconds, a best time that only six runners have ever beaten in the history of the sprint. Only one of them, the now 31-year-old Jamaican Yohan Blake, is still in the running. His best time of 9.69 seconds is from 2012, and in the nine years since then he has not managed to beat 9.90.

Bromell is lucky that he is not one of the absent. At the games of Rio he reached the finals at the age of 21 and was last. As the final runner of the American relay, he crossed the finish line in third place - in vain because the team was disqualified because of a faulty substitution - and did not get up again. He had torn his Achilles tendon and was being pushed off the track in a wheelchair. Two operations, three years and a coach change later, he was a competitive sprinter again.

Coach Rana Rider and Bromell used the 2020 season and the postponement of the Olympic Games for a convincing comeback, in which the sprinter undercut ten seconds several times.

Perhaps this says something about the perspective of the 26-year-old, who was raised by a single mother in the poor south of St. Petersburg in Florida and who also asserted his dominance at the World Championships in Eugene (Oregon) in 2022 and Budapest in 2023 and Olympia in 2024 in Paris should show: Ricky Simms, the manager of Usain Bolt, has him under contract.

Blocked for smoking weed

For women, in addition to the Dutch Daphne Schippers, who limited herself to the 200 meters, over which she became world champion in Beijing 2015 and London 2017, there is a big absentee: Sha'Carri Richardson. The American has undercut eleven seconds five times this year and is at least the third fastest of the season with 10.72 seconds. But after winning the trials, the 21-year-old tested positive - not for Covid and not for a doping agent, but for marijuana.