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Marcell Jacobs wins 60m race in return
Italy’s Marcell Jacobs returned to competition for the first time since dropping jaws by winning gold at the Tokyo Olympic Games in the 100m event.
This time, he ran the 60m distance at the ISTAF Indoor in Berlin, a World Athletics Indoor Tour Silver level meet.
He won in the time of 6.51, not too far off of his personal best of 6.47, which he achieved last March in Poland. It is the national record. He also owns the outdoor 100m national record with his Tokyo final sprint of 9.80. The sprint gold came on Aug. 1. Five days later he helped break the national 4 x 100m record. Team Italy clocked a 37.50 finish time and won gold in that event too.
In the final, he became the first Italian to win the gold medal in the event, and the first European to win since Linford Christie won in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Shelby Houlihan
Shelby Houlihan is to serve another three years of her four-year doping ban. While doing so, she continues to fight to clear her name from the charges that she took anabolic steroid nandrolone. Houlihan continues to train and recently ran a 4:03 1500m on her own.
On her Instagram profile, she has openly talked about the ban as well as a GoFundMe campaign that she has running to help her continue to train. It is unclear if she continues to be paid by Nike Corp., however, she continues to promote the brand.
Houlihan is making her fight more public yet with a website: www.clearshelby.com.
“I am humbling myself in front of all of you to say that fighting this fight has put an immense strain on me financially. I’ve paid for everything out of pocket. I am determined to continue to try to prove my innocence and to get my career back, but in order to do so, I am in need of help from my community. No amount is too small and everything that you feel able to give would be so incredibly welcome. I will fight this fight as long as I can, and just as before, I believe that the truth will finally come out and I will be back on that track with an entirely new fire lit under me.”
She told Athletics Illustrated in September, “For us, looking at all of the possibilities, we knew that pig offal was a natural source of nandrolone and that eating it could elevate the levels in the body. We knew that I had eaten a burrito from a food truck that also served pig offal approximately 10 hours prior to that. We knew that when you ingest pig offal that contains nandrolone, the levels of that hormone in the body reach its peak around 10 hours after consumption. To us, this was the most logical explanation of how this could have happened. The only thing that we truly did know with 100% certainty was that I did not intentionally take that substance or any other prohibited substance in any form.”
She currently holds three national records including running 3:54.99 in the 1500m, 14:23.92 in the 5000m, and 16:27.02 as part of the 4 x 1500m relay team that ran the record in Portland, OR in July 2020.
