“Because I was abandoned as a little boy, I feared that if I didn’t do things right, people could abandon me,” he said, adding that the fear of failure paralyzed him. Nevertheless, the accusations saddened him, he said, because they undercut years of hard work and sacrifice. That a member of Britain’s own relay team tested positive for doping “makes you laugh,” he said. He chalked it up to sour grapes after Italy won the soccer championship, and then he and his teammates beat the British by a nose in the 4x100-meter relay.īritain “lost everything,” he said with a shrug and joked about the British announcer who memorably screamed “ No! It’s Italy” at the 400-meter finish line. The British media, suspicious of his dipping under the 10-second mark only this year, have leveled accusations of doping. Jacobs’s Olympic honeymoon short by doubting he will ever race again. He recently proposed marriage to her with a fireworks display and is looking forward to “a multiethnic wedding” with her Ecuadorean family at Lake Garda.īut some critics have tried to cut Mr. Other posts include risqué Jacuzzi shots with Nicole Daza, the mother of two of his three children. Jacobs’s social media output consists of photos of him looking model-serious or showing off a ripped torso abundantly tattooed with his children’s names and birth dates, inspirational phrases, a tiger and a Roman gladiator.

Jacobs, who had two of them in his backpack.Ī significant portion of Mr. Italy had a record haul at the Olympics, 40 medals, including five in athletics. Jacobs’s chiseled chin and clean-shaved dome became the new face of Italian excellence in a year with an abundance of it. In a nation where some populist politicians have courted support by demonizing Black migrants, the victory by the son of a Black American father and white Italian mother broadened the public imagination of what Italian athletes, and Italians, can look like. Jacobs, a little-known Italian when the Games began, stunned the sports world by winning gold in the men’s 100-meter dash. Then he took a calming breath, crouched and exploded, running faster than anyone on the track, anyone in Italy - almost anyone on Earth.Īt the Tokyo Olympics, Mr. Jacobs bobbed his head to the trap music pumping out of a portable speaker and sauntered up to the starting line. “You make us old guys dream,” said one of the old guys. ROME - Romans ran laps around Lamont Marcell Jacobs as he stretched his legs on the track.

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