Alia Atkinson finished 8th in the women’s 100m breaststroke in the Rio 2016 Olympics at the Olympic Aquatic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Monday.
Atkinson finished last after clocking 1:08:10. The race was won by American Lilly King, who set a new Olympics record of 1:04.93 to take the gold medal. Russia’s Yulia Efimova won the silver medal in a time of 1:05.50 and bronze went to American Katie Meili, who finished in 1:05:69.
Atkinson, who is competing in her fourth Olympic Games, finished fourth at the London 2012 Olympics.
In the semi-finals, the 27-year-old Jamaican swimmer clocked behind clocked 1:06.52 minutes to finish third, the same as American Katie Meili with China’s Jinglin Shi second in 1:06.31. The race was won by one of the favourites for the event, American Lilly King in 1:05.70.
Despite not never winning an Olympic medal, Atkinson was the first black woman to win a world swimming title in Doha 2014 and then a bronze medal at the world championships in Kazan in 2015. Atkinson won a silver medal in the 50-metre breaststroke in a national record of 30.11 seconds and also a bronze in the 100m breaststroke, both at the FINA World Swimming Championships (Long Course) in Russia. She also took bronze in the 100m breaststroke at the Pan American Games in Toronto, Canada.
Jamaica is competing in four sports in Rio – swimming, diving, gymnastics and athletics. The country has won 67 medals in total at the Olympics. All of Jamaica’s Olympic medals, except one, came from athletics. The medal won outside of athletics came at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow when cyclist David Weller won a bronze in the 1000 metres time trials.
