Marcell Jacobs, Olympic 100-Meter Champion, Looks to Prove the Doubters Wrong
The strict security protocols governing the movements of President Sergio Mattarella of Italy dictate that he is not permitted to appear in the same location repeatedly. He is, in this respect and probably this respect alone, like lightning: He is not supposed to strike twice.
In rare circumstances, the rules can be bent. So last month, Mr. Mattarella was in attendance twice at track and field’s European Championships in Rome: once for the final of the men’s 100 meters, and once for the 4×100-meter relay. It seems the Italian president, like the rest of the country, cannot get enough of Marcell Jacobs.
A day after the second event, Mr. Mattarella met the 29-year-old Jacobs in person when Italy’s Olympic team was invited to the Quirinal, the presidential palace in Rome, for an official reception. The squad is a glittering one, including the champion high-jumper Gianmarco Tamberi and two of tennis’s brightest talents, Jasmine Paolini and Jannik Sinner.
There is no question, though, about which athlete is the headline act: Jacobs, the repurposed long jumper, son of an American father and an Italian mother, who in 2021 came out of nowhere to become the first Italian to reach the men’s Olympic 100-meter final, and then, 9.80 seconds later, the first to win it. Five days later, Italy won gold in the men’s relay. Jacobs ran the second leg.
Three years on, he has learned to handle his status well enough, happily obliging selfie hunters, graciously greeting well-wishers, coolly ignoring the awe-struck glances as he crosses the street. Still, he admits to finding it a little strange, a touch limiting, occasionally even slightly enervating.
“After a while, I like going out to dinner without having to stand up to have my photo taken,” he said. “But it is what I wanted. I wanted to be a great athlete. I wanted to be an example for young people. I wanted to make them understand my story, that I am not a superhero, that I do not have special powers.”
His story, of course, is what makes him such a draw, eliciting even presidential fascination. Some see light: a feel-good fantasy about an unheralded athlete who stunned the world’s best and claimed gold. Others see shadow, because track and field has long since learned to distrust suspiciously sudden rises.
Jacobs says neither version is the truth. Whether people see light or dark, he said, “fairy tales do not exist.”
A bolt from the blue
To address the issue directly: Marcell Jacobs denies the allegations and persistent whispers about doping that have followed him ever since his starburst at the Tokyo Games. He has never failed a doping control, or been subject to a doping violation.
“Often it happens that when someone runs fast, people think they have taken something,” he said. “I know I have always done everything in the best possible way. I don’t give it a lot of importance. Maybe people are jealous.”
His problem is that he cannot prove a negative, not conclusively. His rise was meteoric: He had started to concentrate exclusively on sprinting only two years before Tokyo. He had only broken the 10-second barrier a few weeks before the Games. He was so far off the radar that he wasn’t even in the pool of athletes subjected to more frequent testing.
He also, only a couple of months before Tokyo, cut ties with Giacomo Spazzini, a nutritionist who had been embroiled in an Italian police investigation into the illegal distribution of anabolic steroids. Spazzini was later acquitted of any wrongdoing by a court in Milan.
And then there was what came after Tokyo. “I thought that once you won an Olympics, everything would become easier,” Jacobs said in an interview in June. “But it becomes harder. In every race, there is a pressure to be an Olympic champion. You have to win.”
In the years since Tokyo, Jacobs has intermittently lived up to that status: He took gold in the world indoor championships and the European championships in 2022, a relay silver at the 2023 world championships, another European title in Rome this year. Those results, he said, prove his Olympic medals were no fluke.
But more often than he would like, Jacobs acknowledged, he has not run at all. He didn’t race after Tokyo, drawing the curtain on his season a few weeks after the Olympics because of fatigue. He lost most of last year, too. When he did appear, at the world championships, he did not even qualify for the 100-meter final.
The whispers that his rise had been too good to be true grew louder. The idea, first raised by Michael Johnson that his title was “a bit tenuous because of no track record of world-beating performances,” gained traction. Fred Kerley, the never-not-outspoken world champion in 2022 and 2023, pointedly remarked that “real dogs come and play outdoors,” and hinted that Jacobs might not be a “real dog.”
That is not how Jacobs remembers it. What he remembers is the pain: a problem with his sciatic nerve that left him with “pins and needles from my back to my feet every day for three months.
“It was very difficult to understand how to make the problem go away,” he said. “Nothing worked. I ran 10 meters and everything hurt.”
By the time he arrived in Budapest last summer for the world championships, Jacobs had been able to train “only five or six times.” That he left with a medal of any color, and in any event, he said, was far more than he expected.
All of it, though — the allegation, the injuries, the pressure — took a toll. Late last year, Jacobs said he found himself questioning whether he still drew any pleasure from being on the track. “It had always been the place which felt like home, ever since I was a child,” he said. “It was where I felt good, where I wanted to be.”
At that point, though, he “had got to a phase where I didn’t like athletics any more. I was doing it because I had to do it, not because I enjoyed it.”
To have any hope of retaining his Olympic title in Paris — and perhaps to silence those whispers — he realized he needed to start a different story.
“I wasn’t focused on myself anymore,” he said. “I had to take the book, close it, and open another one.”
Culture shock
Jacobs did not — as most athletes, a year out from the Olympics, might — make a couple of minor tweaks. He decided it was better to be safe than sorry, and changed everything.
He moved his wife and their two children to Jacksonville, Fla. He signed up to be coached by Rana Reider in a group that also contained the American sprinter Trayvon Bromell and the Japanese star Sani Brown.
“If I had to do something, I had to change my whole life,” Jacobs said. “I had to go somewhere else in the world and start from scratch. I knew it was the most difficult choice, but I think difficult choices are the ones that are the most rewarding.”
At first, he found the transition a little intimidating. He had always felt a connection to the United States through his heritage, but he had not lived there since he was an infant. English is not his first language.
“I always thought of myself as quite American,” he said. “But I realized I am still often very Italian.”
Most important, his reset helped him discover the thing that he had been missing. Although he found himself training not only with his peers but also with several direct rivals, he “found a group who are very open, willing to talk, to help.”
“By yourself, you reach a limit and think it is your maximum,” he added. “Being challenged by someone who is better pushes you to try harder.”
Jacobs is not an especially demonstrative sprinter; he is not one of those who needs to be “angry” to run, he said. Instead, he seeks peace and tranquillity. The changes in his life, focusing on the shock of the new, allowed him to rediscover those qualities.
“It helped me get in touch with myself again, to relax,” he said. “Last year, I didn’t like what I did. Now I love it again, and it is a beautiful thing. I wake up in the morning and I feel happy. I go to the field with joy.”
It is a feeling he has not had for some time, since he stood on the start line in Tokyo. “Then, I knew what to do,” he said. “I did not have to think.”
In Rome, despite the pressure of a hometown crowd, of an event that had emblazoned his face on all of the branding, Jacobs performed like an Olympic champion. Mr. Mattarella, disregarding his security protocols, was there to cheer. Italy, watching on, seemed to fall in love all over again.
Jacobs’s plan is that his journey should end the same way in Paris, with a victory that he hopes — once and for all — will prove that his version of the fairy tale is the one that should endure.
“I’m not an athlete who won, won, won,” he said. “I lost, and lost, and lost, and then finally I won. If you believe in it, if you work hard and don’t ever give up, you get there.”
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