U.S. team floors Usain Bolt’s Jamaica at World Relays

The U.S. won gold over Usain Bolt at a global championship for the first time since 2007 in the 4x100m relay at the IAAF World Relays in Nassau, Bahamas at the weekend.
The U.S. quartet of Mike Rodgers, Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay and Ryan Bailey clocked 37.38 seconds, beating the Bolt-anchored Jamaican team that finished in 37.68.
Rodgers, Gatlin and Gay provided a .48 lead to Bailey, according to IAAF splits, which proved too much of a deficit for Bolt to make up in a rematch of the anchor legs from the 2012 Olympics. At the London Games, Bolt and Bailey received their batons almost simultaneously, and Bolt won it by two tenths of a second.
Bailey celebrated the U.S. victory by mimicking Bolt’s famous “To Di World” pose, turning it into a throat-slashing gesture.
The U.S. quartet included the three fastest Americans in the 100m in 2014, plus Bailey, who was fifth in the 2012 Olympic 100m.
The Jamaican quartet did not include Olympic 100m silver medalist Yohan Blake, who has been plagued by injuries since he matched Gay as the second-fastest 100m sprinter ever two weeks after the London Olympics. Nor did it include Asafa Powell, the 100m world-record holder before Bolt who was the fastest Jamaican 100m sprinter in 2014.
The World Relays were anticipated as a Bolt-Gatlin showdown, but Gatlin, the fastest 100m sprinter in the world in 2014, ran the second leg in both the preliminary heat and the final, as he did in the London Olympic final. Bolt and Gatlin have not raced head to head since 2013.