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Rio 2016 day 13 round-up: Usain Bolt adds to his glittering golden collection in men's 200m final win

The Jamaican admitted afterwards that the race may be his last 200m at a major championships

Matt Gatward
Rio de Janeiro
Thursday 18 August 2016 22:07 BST
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The triple triple is still on.

The remarkable Usain Bolt cruised to victory in 19.78 seconds to win the 200m final here on Thursday night in the Olympic Stadium to add to his glittering golden collection. These Games – and it does all seem like a game to the lightning Jamaican - are once again his on the track just as Beijing and London were.

Bolt, who turns 30 on Sunday, now needs only to add the 4x100m relay on Friday to complete his third hat-trick following 100m, 200m and relay glory in 2008 and 2012.

After dry Wednesday, Team GB turned on the medal tap again on Thursday adding plenty more gongs – including three more golds - to the Olympic tally in all corners of Rio.

The most heroic family of the day were the Brownlees: Alistair and his younger brother Jonny winning gold and silver respectively in the triathlon around Copacabana before embracing tearfully on the ground having collapsed over the finishing line.

For Alistair it was a defence of his 2012 title and for Jonny it was a step up from bronze in London. They had been together leading the field until the third lap of four on the final 10km run when Alistair – as older brothers are wont to do – ran away to claim the bragging rights. Not that there was any boasting. Alistair seemed as proud of his brother’s silver as his own gold.

Alistair walked the last few meters, waiting for his brother to catch up and applauded him home before crossing the line. They fell to the floor and embraced: one of the celebrations of the Games.

Out at Guanabara Bay, Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark finally got their hands on gold having been made to wait by a lack of wind on Wednesday.

The breeze blew sufficiently for Clark and Mills to complete the job as they kept out of trouble and finished eighth. All they had to do was finish in the 470 and victory was their’s ahead of the Kiwis Jo Aleh and Polly Powrie who beat them to gold in 2012.

With the race run they rammed their dinghy into shore, jumped out and hugged exuberant family members in the breaking waves.

“It’s a once in a lifetime moment,” 28-year-old Mills said.

Hannah’s mum, Fiona, dripping wet from hugging her daughter told The Independent: “Delighted is an understatement. Shocked would be a better word. I’m so proud of the girls. They are such fun-loving, lovely people. It was more than the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. It meant that much to them.

“She was sobbing into my shoulder. I was going: ‘Hannah, in a minute we are going to have to turn around…stop crying!’ But she is so, so pleased.”

Delighted is an understatement. Shock would be a better word. I’m so proud of the girls.

&#13; <p>Fiona Mills, Hannah's mother</p>&#13;

The final gold medal of the saw Jade Jones repeat her London 2012 heroics to win the women's 57kg final and retain her Olympic title, with the Welshwoman defeating Eva Calvo Gomez of Spain. Two stunning head kicks in the final round clinched a 16-7 victory for 23-year-old Jones, and sees her become just the third British woman to retain an Olympic gold medal following Laura Trott and Charlotte Dujardin - who successfully defended their London 2012 Olympic crowns earlier this week.

Great Britain’s Jon Schofield and Liam Heath went one better than four years ago, winning silver by a fraction of a second (0.03 to be exact) from the Lithuania duo in the men’s kayak double on Rio’s Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon.

Schofield and Heath surged to the finish following a thrilling display of power over 200m and were done and dusted inside 33 seconds of brute force.

"It was fast and furious. We gave it a bit of a lunge for the line,” Heath, 32 from Guildford, Surrey, told the BBC. “We hit it as hard as we could. You just put your head down and go for it and pop your head up at the end," he added.

“It is so satisfying,” Schofield, 31 from Clitheroe in Lancashire, said: “[Liam] has been on fire in training. I didn’t want to let this guy down.”

Langridge and Ellis react to their victory

Chris Langridge and Marcus Ellis won an unexpected bronze for Great Britain beating China’s Biao Chai and Hong Wei 21-18, 19-21, 21-10 in the men's doubles at Riocentro.

The first and second games were tight, settled by the odd point here or there but Langridge and Ellis – who had made an impassioned defence of their sport, pointing out it is not something your nan plays in the garden, after losing their semi-final – ran away with the third game.

They were delirious at the end having sealed GB’s first badminton medal since 2004.

Nicola Adams has ensured she will win at least a silver medal after she won her bout on Thursday against her old rival China’s Ren Cancan in the flyweight semi-final.

Adams is just four rounds away from becoming a gold medal winner for the second time, a British record that has been in place since 1924, and her extreme composure against Cancan was quite extraordinary. She made a hard task look simple, a very good fighter look ordinary and one can only hope there is more to come when she fights Frenchwoman Sarah Ourahmoune in Saturday’s final.

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