Aug 5, 2021 5 min read

A five-minute burst of action near the backstretch of the Olympic track served up the perfect snapshot of what is going right, and all that is going wrong, for the U.S. track and field team in Tokyo.

At one moment in the pole vault pit Thursday night, Katie Nageotte cleared 4.90 meters (16 feet, 1 inch) and went running up to the stands to celebrate a gold medal that had looked like a lost cause only an hour earlier.

At the next, just as the 400-meter sprinters approached the halfway point, American champion Michael Norman was steaming so far ahead of the competition, it became clear he could not sustain the pace.

He didn’t. Norman finished fourth. The U.S. men’s sprinters, once the dominant power across the global track game, left the stadium without having won a single gold medal over the first seven days of the nine-day meet.

But Nageotte’s gold, won in a tense back-and-forth with Russian athlete Anzhelika Sidorova, was the third victory in the field for the U.S., two of which have been won by women.

With only two days left at Olympic Stadium, what started as anomaly can now be considered a trend:

The U.S. women are doing well.

The U.S. men are not.

The U.S. overall is doing well in field events.

It is struggling overall on the track.

Other instances that played out Thursday for the Americans:

• Grant Holloway, the defending world champion who came .01 seconds short of the world record earlier this summer in the 110-meter hurdles, came .05 short of Jamaica’s Hansle Parchment, who won in 13.09. It was Jamaica’s third Olympic gold medal of the post-Usain Bolt era.
• Will Claye, considered as good a bet as any to win with the defending champion, Christian Taylor, on the sideline, finished fourth in triple jump. The winner: Pedro Pichardo of Portugal.

Other winners on a day where eight gold medals were awarded included Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium (heptathlon) and Damian Warner of Canada (decathlon).

The U.S. closed Thursday with five – and 20 medals overall, which is 13 more than anyone else – and there have been some exceptions to the trends.

Athing Mu and Sydney McLaughlin lived up to their hype to capture the country’s only two golds from the track. And Ryan Crouser gutted out an emotion-drenched victory to defend his Olympic shot put title.

Very few would’ve figured Crouser’s win Thursday would be the first in any event for the men, who make up about half of the deepest team in the world.

Norman’s fourth-place finish capped a dreary day of running for the red, white and blue.

Takedown for gold

David Taylor seized the most important moment of his wrestling life.

The American scored a double-leg takedown with 17 seconds remaining to beat Iran’s Hassan Yazdani 4-3 and claim the gold medal in the freestyle 86-kilogram class.

“There was no way I wasn’t going to find a way,” he said “It’s the gold medal, man. I was going to rip my arms off if I had to.”

Taylor expected a tough match from the man nicknamed “The Greatest.” Yazdani, the No. 1 seed, won the 74-kilogram class at the 2016 Olympics.

“I like to win 10-0, but getting it done in the last seconds feels pretty good, too,” Taylor said.

He took advantage of Yazdani’s decision to be cautious.

“I think he only tried three times to score,” Taylor said. “I always say that if you want to be the best in the world, you need to take people down twice. You need to get two takedowns. Tonight was a good example of that. I needed two takedowns.”

There might be more gold coming for the United States.

National champion Gable Steveson reached the 125-kilogram final with a 5-0 semifinal win over Lkhagvagerel Munkhtur of Mongolia.

He’ll face Georgia’s Geno Petriashvili, the No. 1 seed and a three-time world champion.

Soccer bronze

Megan Rapinoe and Carli Lloyd each scored a pair of goals and the United States won the bronze medal in women’s soccer with a 4-3 victory over Australia.

It was arguably the best the Americans had looked during the course of a rocky tournament that opened with an uncharacteristic 3-0 loss to Sweden. Rapinoe set the tone early with a goal scored directly from a corner kick.

The loss spoiled the Australians’ first-ever trip to the medal round at the Olympics. No Australian soccer team, men or women, has ever won a medal.

Sprint debut

The United State’s Nevin Harrison won the women’s canoe sprint 200 in the event’s Olympic debut, overtaking Canada’s Laurence Vincent Lapointe at the halfway mark and powering across the finish line.