Defending 100-meter champ Marcell Jacobs comes to Olympics hoping to prove his doubters wrong

PARIS (AP) — Now that Marcell Jacobs is part of Olympic history, he knows a little bit about it,too.

Part of that is knowing that if he defends his title in the 100 meters come Sunday, all those doubters, naysayers and people who called him a fluke won’t have much more to say on that topic.

“It’s hard to arrive at the Olympic Games and win,” Jacobs said. “But it’s even harder to continue to win.”

Jacobs, a Texas-born Italian, doesn’t hide from the fact that he hasn’t won much — at least not on the biggest stages — since he shocked the world and captured the gold medal three years ago at the Tokyo Games.

It has been three years filled with injuries and doubts. With those have come questions from inside his country, where dreams of having an Olympic champion felt as foreign as Jamaican reggae.

Not long had passed after Jacobs’ Olympic win, in a European record time of 9.80 seconds, that news resurfaced about reports from earlier in the year that his former nutritionist was being investigated for distributing performance enhancers. Jacobs had cut ties with the nutritionist, who eventually was cleared, months before the Games.

But Jacobs pulled out of a number of meets after Tokyo, saying he was tired and needed to get his ailing knee right. All that added up to suspicions he was doping — suspicions that never were proven, and that he says didn’t bother him then, and still don’t today.

The rest of the criticism, he concedes, did take its toll.

“In Italy, we never had an Italian guy arrive in the final of the Olympic Games,” he said. “But I won and they continued to criticize me for the rest. So, this is what hurt me.”

These days, if he’s not being questioned, he’s being overlooked. Jacobs is listed as a 30-1 long shot to repeat, far behind Noah Lyles, Kishane Thompson and basically every other “name” among the 100-meter men, who kick off their opening round Saturday.

Jacobs reminded everyone who the favorite was heading into Tokyo. It was American Trayvon Bromell, who came into the meet with the fastest time in the world to that point, at 9.76. Bromell didn’t make it out of the semifinal round.

“Everybody said the rest of us were racing for the silver medal,” Jacobs said. “He didn’t arrive in the final. The Olympics is different.”