JAMAICA’S Elaine Thompson won the Olympic women’s 100 meters gold medal with a time of 10.71 seconds in the final Saturday, beating two-time defending champion and compatriot Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce into third place.

    “When I crossed the line and glanced around to see I was clear, I didn’t quite know how to celebrate,” Thompson said after she routed the field in 10.71 seconds, with Fraser-Pryce taking bronze.

    The nation that produced the once-in-a-lifetime sprinter in Usain Bolt has more of a production line going on the women’s side. Thompson joins the likes of Merlene Ottey, Veronica Campbell-Brown and, of course, Fraser-Pryce in the island country’s long line of sprinting luminaries.

    At 24, more than five years younger than the woman she unseated, Thompson showed a changing of the guard doesn’t have to mean a redrawing of the map.

    “Jamaica has so many talented sprinters,” Thompson said.

    What was billed as one of the most competitive finals in the history of the event turned into something of a non-race. Thompson made it that way.

    Running about level halfway through the 100 meters, she pulled away from American Tori Bowie for a .12-second victory — a gap big enough to scoot a bookcase between her and the American.

    Thompson’s 10.71 was only .01 off the time she ran at Jamaica’s national championships last month. That 10.70 in Kingston was the best of five sub-10.8 women’s sprints this year and served notice that things could be very fast when the sprinters reached Rio de Janeiro.

    Three of those sub-10.8 women were in the final — Bowie and another American, English Gardner, were the others — as was Fraser-Pryce, the 29-year-old former champion who was a brace-faced newcomer when she won her first of two golds at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing eight years ago. (SD-Agencies)