Marcell Jacobs- New 100M Olympic Champion

Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy won the fastest track race at the Tokyo Olympics, the men’s 100 meter with personal best and area record of 9.80sec.

Jacobs, who goes by Marcell, beat his personal best time and put his star solidly on the map in the blazing fast race.

The other medalists also broke their personal records. The U.S.’s Fred Kerley, a 26-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, took silver with a time of 9.84, four hundredths of a second behind Jacobs. Canada’s Andre de Grasse won bronze.

Legendary retired Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt has owned this event, winning gold in the 2008 Beijing Games, the 2012 London Games and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

U.S. sprinter Ronnie Baker, 27, came back from a hamstring injury that kept him out of competition for much of 2019. He placed fifth in the final.

Son of an Italian mother and an American father, he was born in El Paso, Texas, U.S., where he spent less than the first month of his childhood. When his father was transferred to South Korea, he moved to Desenzano del Garda with his mother. He began practicing athletics there at the age of ten, initially preferring sprinting, then discovering the long jump in 2011. He later moved to Rome, where he lives with his partner Nicole and his two children, Anthony (born 2019) and Megan (born 2021). Jacobs has a son, Jeremy (born 2013), from a previous relationship when he was 19.

In 2016, Jacobs won the Italian Athletics Championships in long jump. With a personal best of 8.07 m, he ranked at tenth place on the IAAF world leading list at the end of the 2017 indoor season. At the 2016 Italian U23 Championships he jumped 8.48 m, the best performance for an Italian, although this result cannot be recognized as a national record due to the wind in favour of 2.8 m/s (the regulation limit is 2.0 m/s).

On 13 May 2021, in Savona, Italy, he set the Italian record in the 100 metres with a time of 9.95 s,becoming the 150th person in history to break the 10-second barrier. On 26 June 2021, notwithstanding a headwind of ?1.0 m/s, he beat the Italian championships’ record with a time of 10.01 s, in Rovereto, winning his fourth national title in a row.