Still image from the athletics track Tokyo 2020 Spread on social media. Niger and Germany were side by side in the lane in the fourth battery of the women’s 200m race, and before the start, the official drawings clearly showed the flags with their respective abbreviations: “Nig-Ger” books, which constitutes the derogatory and offensive word used to address African Americans.

A small misstep that spread around the world and embarrassed the direction of Tokyo 2020, which, on the other hand, could do nothing else. On the same athletics track today, Friday 6 August, the sporting history of Italy is written further: the relay race consists of Lorenzo Bata, Marcel Jacobs, Iossa DeSallo and Filippo Tortue Incredibly she managed to win the gold, as Torto completed a comeback on Great Britain, eventually mocking her with just a penny.

Among other things, for Jacobs, this was a double victory, which made him even more in the history books: the 100m / 4×100 relay prop at the Olympics in the past 50 years has only worked for four other athletes. All of them with pretty heavy names: they are Carl Lewis (1984), Donovan Bailey (1996), Maurice Green (2000) and Usain Bolt (2012).