Tokyo 2020 Olympics: GB win 20th gold, Brazil take men’s football – as it happened

BONG! Big Ben has struck midnight and a fresh liveblog has been born. Tom Lutz is in charge of it, and you can find it here:

And so, with the marathon leaders about 20km into their race, my own is run. Enjoy the last day of the 2020/whatever Olympics, everyone. Bye!

Marathon: Meanwhile cameras catch Daniel Do Nascimento, the Brazilian currently leading the race, smiling and fist-bumping Eliud Kipchoge. For all the athletes struggling already, those two seem entirely relaxed.

Marathon: And as I type that Alemu Bekele becomes the third withdrawal, swiftly followed by Ukraine’s Oleksandr Sitkovskiy, Gabriel Gerald Geay of Tanzania and the 2012 gold medallist Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda.

Marathon: There are 63 athletes within a minute of the leader, 16 between one and two minutes back, and 14 between two minutes and three minutes eight seconds back. Six still have not reached 15km, so are more than 5min behind, and two are confirmed to have withdrawn so far.

Marathon: The leaders have now covered 15km, and the leading pack is now down to 43, all within 5sec of the leader. Britain’s Callum Hawkins is the last of those.

Marathon: About 13.5km in and Joohan Oh, the Kenya-born South Korean, is walking. He may also have a hamstring problem. His personal best is 2hrs 5min 13sec, a very decent time, and he won the Seoul marathon in 2018, 2016, 2015 and 2012. Australia’s Jack Rayner, who came 13th at the London Marathon in 2019, has stopped.

Marathon: Callum Hawkins, the leading Briton, has managed to hang on to the leading pack so far, but they are now dropping him. The other two Britons, Ben Connor and Chris Thompson, are around 1min 40sec behind.

Marathon: Kiprotich is currently walking. Conditions are clearly brutal for athletes of such standing to be falling already.

Marathon: The leaders have now run 10km, in 30min 53sec. 50 athletes are within 10sec of that time. Kiprotich’s demise has been somewhat exaggerated: he’s still going, but has been dropped by the leaders and is 41sec behind. Alemu Bekele, the Ethiopia-born Bahrainian, passed the 10km mark in the leading pack but has since stopped, restarted, and is now running slowly, well off the pace.

Marathon: Stephen Kiprotich, who won the marathon in 2012 and came 14th in Rio, has also stopped. “Now I say I can die a champion, I cannot die a useless man,” he said after his victory in London, and that at least can never be taken away from him.

Marathon: Shura Kitata, the Ethiopian who won the London marathon last year, has stopped running and is holding his right hamstring.

Marathon: I’m not entirely sure how Ivan Zarco Alvarez got here. His PB is 2hrs 18min 19sec, about seven minutes more than anyone else in the race. He was born in Barcelona, and got his place just last month after the US-born sprinter Melique Garcia failed to get a Honduran passport.

Marathon: Suarez and Germany’s Amanal Petros are first at the 5km mark, but there are 51 others within six seconds of them. There are also 16 athletes who are already more than 45sec off the lead, including two Poles, two Britons, a pair of Estonians and with the Honduran Ivan Zarco Alvarez last of all, 1min 17sec back.

Marathon: Jeison Alexander Suarez is the early leader. Far too early for it to count for anything, obviously. His world ranking is 553.

Marathon: Seven minutes in, and the group is already quite strung out. It looks like Britain’s Chris Thompson might be bringing up the rear at the moment.

Marathon: Japan’s Suguru Osako, Galen Rupp, Lelisa Desisa and Eliud Kipchoge were the four two get special treatment. One of them is the big home hope, one of the others is Kipchoge, and the other two aren’t exactly obscure. Birhanu Legese, the Ethiopian currently ranked No1 by World Athletics, Evans Chebet, the Kenyan No2, and Mosinet Geremew, the Ethiopian No4, are among those missing from the line-up. Lawrence Cherono of Kenya is the highest-ranked competitor.

Marathon: Four of the athletes are introduced to the crowd, the crowd in question being the other competitors, who clap quietly. And then, they’re off!

Marathon: If anyone understands the logic behind the bib numbers, I’m all ears. They start at 1027 and end at 3965. There are not nearly 3000 competitors.

Marathon: The athletes are out and warming up. It is currently 26C in Sapporo, with 80% humidity, and is due to rise to 28C or so over the next couple of hours.

Marathon: The men’s marathon is just half an hour away. It starts and finishes in Odori Park, which according to the website of Sapporo’s tourist office “is called a park, but it’s really a street”. The word “odori” literally means “big road”. This sounds a bit rum, but then London gets away with having a big road called Park Lane (though that, to be fair, is next to an actual park). Lots of festivals are held in Odori Park, including Hokkai Bon Odori Dance, “a traditional and merry Japanese festival that is celebrated with dance and lively drum performances to welcome the homecoming of ancestral spirits”. This year’s Hokkai Bon Odori starts next Saturday.

Boxing: The final bout of this year’s Olympic boxing, due to start in about eight hours’ time, will be the men’s super heavyweight final between the giant Bakhodir Jalolov of Uzbekistan and the American Richard Torrez Jr. The two have met once before, in Ekaterinburg almost exactly two years ago, when the fight ended with this brutal knockout blow:

That fight has been the talk of the US boxing camp this week. “It’s been great motivation,’’ said Billy Walsh, head coach of USA Boxing. “When that happened in Russia two years ago, I said to him, ‘This moment will not define you. What will define you is how you come back from this.’” Torrez has the ultimate chance to redefine himself in just a few hours’ time.

Marathon: Favourite to win the men’s marathon, which starts in just under two hours, is Eliud Kipchoge, who is bidding to become the first person in more than 40 years to defend the title. Speaking earlier this week he didn’t sound too excited to be dealing with the heat of Sapporo though as he wisely said “all of us will be in the same frying pan”.

The time has come for the best-of-the-Olympics listicles. Here are Tumaini Carayol’s:

So, what has he missed out?

PA Media have been hanging out at Heathrow airport while a plane full of Olympic athletes was touching down:

Team GB medal winners have been reunited with their loved ones in emotional scenes as they returned home from the Olympic Games today.

Canoeist Liam Heath and pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw were among those to touch down at Heathrow Airport on Saturday evening sporting medals following their success at Tokyo 2020.

Heath, who won bronze in the K1 200m, was reunited with his three-year-old daughter Sarah, who ran towards him as he arrived at Terminal Five. Other family members waved a poster that said “Welcome Back Daddy” as the Olympians were greeted with applause.

Heath, 36, from Guildford, told the PA news agency: “She [Sarah] looks so grown up. She grows every day but you don’t really see it when you’re with her 24/7. I think it’s the longest time I’ve actually been away from Sarah since she was born – nearing on a month. She’s a proper little person and I absolutely adore her. It was absolutely incredible to come back home and see her running towards me.”

Heath is Team GB’s most successful canoeist – with four Olympic medals won so far, including the bronze in Tokyo. His wife Emily said she was looking forward to much-needed family time with her husband and daughter. “You get used to them being gone all the time but at the same time you’re longing for their return and literally counting down the days,” she said. “We just made sure the closest lot were at the airport to greet him and then tomorrow we’ll just see what he wants to do. It’s important to have just a bit of time for the three of us.”

Bradshaw, who won bronze in the pole vault, described Tokyo 2020 as “special” despite a lack of spectators due to the coronavirus pandemic.

She told PA: “I think every Olympics is different anyway but this has felt very different in that it’s all about the performance and not about going out and exploring or anything like that. You just trained and came home and you had to be super on it with hygiene. But I think it’s been a really, really good Games and Japan did a really good job to make it feel special even though there was no one there.”

Meanwhile, sailor Dylan Fletcher was greeted by cheers from a crowd of family members who waved Union flags and held up balloons. The 33-year-old won a gold medal in the men’s 49er alongside teammate Stuart Bithell. Fletcher’s mother Jane told PA she had been “shaking” with anticipation ever since his victory.

She said: “We didn’t stop shaking from 5.30 on Tuesday morning all the way through to now. And I think I’m still shaking now and it’s all going to rev up again. I’m so proud for them and of them. They’re phenomenal sailors and phenomenal athletes. Just fantastic.”

Fletcher returns home to busy wedding planning, as he and his fiancee Charlotte are set to get married in 20 days. His mother said: “There’s a lot to do. They’re going to come and chill out with us for a little while for a few days. No doubt we’ll have some champagne and I think there will be a big party on that wedding day when we get there. It will be wonderful.”

Football: There’s one British gold medal that hasn’t helped the nation rise up the medal table: the one taken home by the coach who took Canada to women’s football glory. Suzanne Wrack has the story of Bev Priestman:

A deadly serious Canada manager Bev Priestman admitted she knew her team would go on to clinch Olympic gold after their quarter-final penalty defeat of Brazil. The route ahead meant a semi-final with a team they had not beaten in 20 years, in the USA, and then likely a final against the tournament’s in-form team, Sweden, but she knew. And you didn’t doubt her.

“I’m so so happy to get that gold,” said the 35-year-old, with the medal dangling round her neck. “I knew it was coming. Probably from the Brazil game onwards I knew we had it if the players turned up and they believed, which they did.”

Priestman’s unwavering belief in the abilities of her players and the gameplan of the team has, without question, filtered into the players themselves.

Much more here:

Marathon: Coming up later today/tomorrow (depending on where you live) is the men’s marathon. At the age of 40 Chris Thompson will be one of three British competitors there and clinging to the hope of adding a second major championship medal to the European Championship 10,000m silver he won in Barcelona in 2010.

Earlier this year he “nearly lost my hand” after it was “completely sliced open” when it somehow ended up under the wheel of a removal van. The Olympic trials were nine weeks away. In between his son, Theo, was born. He won the trial in 2hrs 10min 50sec, 40 seconds inside the qualifying time and battering his personal best. He has also overcome potentially career-ending achilles injury, a broken back and, er, a nasty dog bite. “The woman came up to me saying, ‘Don’t worry, he doesn’t have rabies.’ I said, ‘I wasn’t worried about that, but I am now.’”

Water polo: I’m wagering that there hasn’t been a great deal of water polo coverage in today’s blog, and that is a situation that needs to be remedied. Because history will be made in the pool tomorrow, when unfancied outsiders Greece win their first ever water polo medal. But what colour will it be? They face defending champions Serbia in the men’s final and will be underdogs once again, though it doesn’t seem to bother them.

The Greeks are undefeated in Tokyo, though the only match they drew, in the preliminary round, was against the Italy side that Serbia comfortably beat in the quarter-finals. Since then they have routed South Africa 28-5, thrashed the USA 14-5, trounced Montenegro 10-4 and, in the semi-finals, beat nine-time champions and 12-time finalists Hungary 10-6, leading at the end of every quarter. The Greek coach, Theodoros Vlachos, has promised that his team will “fight like crazy” in the gold medal match, which is due to start at 8.30am local time.

“We beat Hungary in the semi-finals with self-sacrifice, heart, tactics, excellent defence, great goals and everything that a final needs because the game was a final for us. I have been waiting for years to guide the national team in the final. I’m very grateful and proud that we did this for Greece. We cannot stop here. We have to fight like crazy in the final. We want the gold, to raise the flag high, and to hear our anthem at the end. We will not waste this moment, and we will give our best.”

Sayōnara from me for the final time in these Olympics, so thanks for your time and your company over the past couple of weeks. I’m off to screw my football head back on and will leave you in the very capable hands of Simon Burnton.

Athletics: American sprinter Allyson Felix met and defied every lofty expectation of her on the way to setting an impossibly high standard of excellence, writes Andrew Lawrence.

If you haven’t signed up for Martin Belam’s daily round-up of the comings and goings in Tokyo throughout these Games, you’ve missed out on a real treat. Here’s the latest instalment …

Today in a nutshell: no surprises as Team USA took the men’s basketball gold, Neeraj Chopra won India’s first ever athletics gold, there were wins in the boxing ring and modern pentathlon for Team GB, and Allyson Felix became the most decorated US track Olympian of all time.

Tomorrow’s key moments: the men’s marathon, track cycling, boxing, a host of team finals, and *gulp* then it’s the closing ceremony and we are done.

Athletics: Sifan Hassan’s odyssey from refugee to one of the greatest athletes of this or any other era was confirmed in Tokyo as she became the first person to win three medals over 1500m, 5,000m and 10,000m, writes Sean Ingle, whose workload over the past two weeks made that of the subject of this article look comparatively lazy.

The last leg of the treble, after 5,000m gold and 1,500m bronze, came as the Dutch athlete sprinted clear of Bahrain’s Kalkidan Gezahegne to win the 10,000m in 29min 55.32sec, with the Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia, the world record holder, winning bronze.

Athletics: Track and field’s most fascinating science experiment has ended in an Olympic 1500m gold medal for Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who has been training as a professional since he was eight, writes Sean Ingle from Tokyo’s Olympic Park. The 20-year-old has long been tipped for greatness after becoming the youngest man to break the four-minute mile at 16. On a muggy Tokyo night the Norwegian, who has been coached by his father, Gjert, since primary school, emphatically confirmed it. Read on …

Baseball: “As Japan cheered its first and perhaps last title it was time to bid farewell to an existential crisis dressed up as an Olympic sport,” writes Tom Dart at Yokohama Stadium. “Why are we here? Will we ever see each other again? If a Fan Cam scans the stands for people dancing to Uptown Funk, in a stadium without any fans, did anyone really bust some moves?” Read on …

Tokyo: This is our senior sports reporter’s sledgehammer subtle way of pointing to his bosses and our readers that he’s still hard at it despite the fact it’s in the early hours of the morning on the final day of the Olympics. Oh … and on top of all that, he’s getting wet. Wouldn’t your heart bleed for him? Poor Seanie.

Tomorrow: The Olympics draw to a close tomorrow, with the closing ceremony slated for noon (BST). Before that, there are a few more medals to be decided.

• Basketball: women’s gold medal match
• Boxing: Men’s light, men’s super heavy, women’s light and women’s middle.
• Cycling: Men’s keirin, women’s omnium and women’s sprint.
• Gymnastics: Group all-around rhythmic.
• Handball: Women’s bronze and gold medal matches.
• Volleyball: Women’s bronze and gold medal matches.
• Water polo: Men’s classification, bronze and gold medal matches.

Boxing: Kellie Harrington, a ridiculously upbeat and cheerful woman who has worked as a part-time cleaner in St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin since the first lockdown, is fast approaching National Treasure status in Ireland. The 31-year-old fights in the final of the women’s light final at 6am (BST) tomorrow. Harrington is hoping to become only the third Irish boxer to win an Olympic gold medal, with Michael Carruth and Katie Taylor being the others. To achieve top spot on the podium, Kellie will have to overcome Brazil’s Beatriz Ferreira. “Are looking forward to seeing her box, and in particular how she deals with the Brazilian?” asks Tom.

I am indeed, Tom. So much so thattomorrow morning will be the first time during these games that I will be settting my alarm for an early start. I must confess I know nothing about Ms Ferreira and had never actually heard of Harrington until about a week ago. As far as Irish amateur boxing is concerned, I am very much your archetypal glory hunter.

An email: “No mention of France’s wins for the Olympic gold in both handball and volleyball?” asks Christina. “Shame on you.”

Crikey. While I could swear I mentioned their win in the handball in a post illustrated by a large photo of them celebrating that victory, I am happy to bow to Christina’s superior knowledge. One more time with feeling: France beat Denmark 25-23 in the men’s handball final and eventually prevailed over the ROC by three sets to two in the volleyball. Allez les bleus!

Irish news: Having plummeted down the placings from fourth during yesterday’s women’s modern pentathlon after being paired with a less than co-operative horse who refused at several fences during a disastrous showjumping round, here’s hoping Natalya will not be reunited with Constantin for the closing ceremony or it might take even longer than usual.

Boxing: Britain’s Galal Yafai says he feels ‘overwhelmed’ after becoming Olympic flyweight champion with an impressive victory over Carlo Paalam of the Philippines. The 28-year-old from Birmingham knocked his opponent down after only 90 seconds of a dominant first round and gained a 4-1 points decision at the Kokugikan Arena to secure gold. Team GB sent 11 boxers to Japan and are guaranteed six medals, their most at a Games since Antwerp in 1920, although they did win three golds at London 2012.

Gymnastics: Israel’s Linoy Ashram won the individual all-around final of the Rhythmic Gymnastics today, beating the ROC’s Dina Averina into second place and ending two decades of Russian dominance. Belarus’ Alina Harnasko finished third. The Russian Olympic Committee were not best pleased with the outcome. “The whole world has seen this injustice,” they tweeted.

Athletics: A nation of 1.3 billion erupted in joy on Saturday after Neeraj Chopra won the men’s javelin at the Tokyo Games to secure India’s first ever Olympic athletics gold post-independence,” according the Reuters bureau in New Delhi.

“Thirteen years after shooter Abhinav Bindra won independent India’s first individual Olympic gold in Beijing, 23-year-old Chopra obliterated the field with a best throw of 87.58 metres.

Expectations soared after the 23-year-old seized the lead with a throw of 87.03 on his first attempt and his second sealed India’s first Olympic athletics medal. The cricket-mad country stayed glued to television sets to follow Chopra’s progress, and social media was abuzz as anticipation of a medal grew.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was joined by President Ram Nath Kovind and several other ministers in paying tribute to Chopra’s success. “History has been scripted at Tokyo! What @Neeraj—chopra1 has achieved today will be remembered forever,” Modi tweeted. “The young Neeraj has done exceptionally well. He played with remarkable passion and showed unparalleled grit. Congratulations to him for winning the Gold.”

India is the most successful hockey nation in Olympic history with eight men’s titles but has largely been starved of individual success. The sports fraternity also lavished praise on Chopra who was described by local media as the ‘man with the golden arm’.

“The impact your victory will create on promoting your sport amongst the country’s youth is immeasurable,” Bindra said in a statement. “Also, welcome you to the club. It is not the most happening of places yet and needs more members, but I feel your entry is going to pave the way for many more deserving athletes.”

Former athlete PT Usha, who came fourth in the women’s 400 metres at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, also hailed Chopra’s achievement. “Realised my unfinished dream today after 37 years. Thank you my son @Neeraj—chopra1,” she tweeted, along with a photograph of her with the javelin thrower.

Modern pentathlon: Germany’s modern pentathlon coach, Kim Raisner, was not part of today’s men’s individual competition at the Tokyo Olympics. Raisner struck a horse with her fist and urged rider Annika Schleu to ‘really hit’ the horse when it refused to jump during the women’s event on Friday.

Alfons Hoermann, president of the Germany Olympic Committee, confirmed the news and called for an overhaul of modern pentathlon rules. Competitors are currently allocated horses for the equestrian stage of the event in a random draw shortly before it begins.

“We were all in agreement that the coach will not be at the competition on Saturday,” Hoermann said. “We also consider that an urgent review of the incident is necessary, especially in terms of animal protection, and that the national and international federations draw their conclusions.”

Baseball: Japan have beaten the USA, a state of affairs I am assured by somebody who knows far more about these things than I do is “definitely” a shock.