Rio de Janeiro: There’s one Jamaican who thinks he can beat Usain Bolt on the straightaway. A few minor details: Add 10 metres and 10 hurdles. Omar McLeod picked up a gold medal in the Olympic 110-metre hurdles on Tuesday night to add to his country’s haul in Rio de Janeiro.
The 22-year-old topped Orlando Ortega of Spain and Dimitri Bascou of France for Jamaica’s first title in the event. Afterward, one question simply had to be asked: Could you beat Bolt if hurdles were added to the mix? ”Yeah, I probably could then,” McLeod said, laughing.
Add the hurdles to the growing list of things the tiny Caribbean Island is dominating. McLeod said he fed off the performances of Bolt in the 100, along with medal-winning performances of Elaine Thompson (gold) and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (bronze) in the women’s 100.
Definitely motivational. “You see them go out and represent themselves, and represent their country, have fun — and they win. They harness medals,” McLeod said. “You want to do the same thing. It’s contagious. You want to feel how it feels. I felt how it feels.”
So, could he turn into the Bolt of the hurdles. “We’ll see,” McLeod said. “The feeling is indescribable. I don’t know what’s going through my mind right now. I need to go back and just recite it a couple times, saying, ‘You’re an Olympic champion.’”
To become a champion, he had to slow down a bit. That’s right, slow down. See, he’s too fast for his own good sometimes, and was approaching the hurdles perhaps a little too quickly. He dialed it back a notch, worked on his timing and cadence and that led to a fast time — 13.05 seconds, which was 0.12 seconds faster than Ortega. “I’ve learned to be patient,” said McLeod, who was sixth at the world championships last year in Beijing. “I honestly played it safe for this. I was reserved a lot. All I needed to do, to be honest, was hurdle.”
