TOKYO — Allyson Felix finished third in the 400 meters Friday to win her 10th career medal and become the most-decorated woman in the history of Olympic track.
The 35-year-old Felix, a stalwart of American track and field, started in the outside lane and outraced Stephanie Ann McPherson of Jamaica to take third place by 0.15 second.
Shaunae Miller-Uibo blew away the field, winning in 48.36 seconds to defend her Olympic title from Rio de Janeiro.
Felix’s 10th Olympic medal broke a tie with Jamaican runner Merlene Ottey and matches Carl Lewis, who also won 10 medals and was alone as the most-decorated U.S. athlete in track.
The victory for Felix comes nearly three years after she helped spearhead a conversation about the way women are treated in track, and sports in general. She severed ties with Nike, which wrote in pay reductions to women's contracts if they became pregnant. Felix had a daughter in 2018.
This is the first bronze medal of an Olympic career that dates to the 2004 Athens Games. Earlier, she had won six gold and three silver. She could go for No. 11 if the U.S. puts her in the 4x400 relay final, which is set for Saturday night.
American women also had a good day at the beach and on the courts, with one Olympic gold medal won and a couple more set up for the taking.
The U.S. beach volleyball team of April Ross and Alix Klineman won gold in beach volleyball and the American women’s basketball and volleyball teams won to advance to the gold medal finals in both sports.
Ross and Klineman swept Australia 21-15, 21-16 in 43 minutes. For Ross, the gold completes a set. She won silver in London in 2012 and bronze in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Klineman won gold in her first Olympics.
“It’s kind of a fairytale story like, ‘Oh, you know I’m going at 39 to try and get my gold medal,’ and the fact that it actually happened feels so special and surreal,” Ross said.
The U.S. women’s volleyball team avenged a gold-medal match loss to Serbia in 2016 with a 25-19, 25-15, 25-23 victory that sends the team back into the final. The Americans have made three previous gold medal finals but have never won.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we have to get redemption of this or that,’” U.S. star Foluke Akinradewo Gunderson said. “It was we just want to win a gold medal and whatever that’s going to take, we’re going to do that.”
The U.S. women’s basketball team will play Japan in Sunday’s final after rolling over Serbia 79-59 behind 15 points and 12 rebounds from Brittney Griner. Japan beat France 87-71.
If the Americans win Sunday, they would match the seven consecutive Olympic titles won by the U.S. men from 1936 to ‘68.
And for Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, it would be five career gold medals, the most ever by a basketball player in the Olympics.
“I think everybody here wants to win gold for them, for us, for everybody that’s started this streak that got us here,” Griner said.
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