“My victories represent extreme hard work” – Olympic champion Lamont Marcell Jacobs shrugs doping accusation


“My victories represent extreme hard work” – Olympic champion Lamont Marcell Jacobs shrugs doping accusation

Lamont Marcell Jacobs

Italian sprinter Lamont Marcell Jacobs defied all odds when he took the title from America’s Fred Kerley by clocking 9.80 seconds at Tokyo 2020. The 27-year-old Jacobs named various records at the Summer Olympics last year.

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However, he has faced some serious doping allegations since then but shook away from all of them. The Tokyo Olympics 100m champion has always claimed that his gold medal was won with “blood, sweat, tears and injuries.”

Jacobs, whose timing represented a new Italian record and the third occasion during the Games where he had broken the 10-second barrier, recently indulged in an exclusive chat with the Daily Telegraph. He continued to vehemently deny any personal wrongdoing, and when asked in the interview if he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, emphatically answered “Absolutely not, and I would not.

“Sometimes what people say can be hurtful”

Lamont Marcell Jacobs
Lamont Marcell Jacobs

Marcell Jacobs didn’t settle for 100m gold at the Tokyo Games as he later notched a historic double by helping the Italian team to gold in the 4x100m relay. As a result, he was duly chosen to carry his country’s flag at the closing ceremony.

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Following this, questions began to rise on Jacobs when his former nutritional advisor, Giacomo Spazzini, was held in a police investigation dubbed ‘Operation Muscle Bound’ over the illegal distribution of anabolic

“People think they can say whatever they want about you without understanding that sometimes what they say can be hurtful.

“The negative pieces hurt me a bit because what they did was put doubt over my victories. My victories represent extreme hard work. Hard work that nobody saw, hard work that was blood, sweat, tears and injuries,” he told during the interview.

Talking about his dubiously timed break from the sport, Jacobs insisted it was down to physical exhaustion, and not a ploy to avoid scrutiny, claiming he “needed to regenerate his mind and body.”

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