American women have owned the 100-meter hurdles event at the Olympics since 2004, winning two golds and five out of a possible nine medals in the last three Olympic Games, along with 13 of the 16 season-best times since 2000.
On Wednesday night in Rio, though, teammates Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin achieved something that had never been done by any nation since the event was first held in 1972. They swept all three medals.
Rollins, a former world champion, won the gold - but the race for silver and bronze was incredibly close. Ali finished .11 seconds behind Rollins in second, but Castlin barely edged Great Britain's Cindy Ofili by two-hundreths of a second. Team USA did this without current world-record holder Kendra Harrison, who failed to make the team a few weeks before clocking the best time ever.
Former 100m hurdles runner Lolo Jones noted that the American team could have accomplished the feat in London - but she failed to medal.
When you were the only USA hurdler that didn't get a medal in 2012, so they didn't sweep. pic.twitter.com/svGlDlQMYj
— Lolo Jones (@lolojones) August 18, 2016
Fun fact: The United States has dominated track and field events at the Olympics since the very first modern Games in 1896. Entering the 2016 Summer Games, Team USA had won a combined 767 medals in Athletics events, more than 550 more than the next closest countries (Great Britain and the Soviet Union).
