London 2012: Kirani James wins Grenada's first Olympic gold medal

Freak of nature Grenadian breaks USA's hold on 400m and eyes Michael Johnson's record
Kirani James
Grenada's Kirani James celebrates after winning the men's 400m final at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

Until Monday night Kirani James was a superstar in the making. As of now he is made. James, only 19 years old, won the Olympic 400m in 43.94sec. It made him the first athlete from outside the USA to break the 44-second barrier and, more importantly, it won Grenada's first ever Olympic medal. James said that right now his home country, which has a population of 110,000, would just be "one huge street party, everyone getting merry and having a good time".

James was already the world champion but he won that title in 44.60sec. In comparison this felt like the kind of breakthrough performance that his coach, Harvey Glance, had been talking about when he said James was "a freak of nature" who was capable of beating Michael Johnson's world record of 43.18sec. "When Michael broke his record he must have been 26 or 27 years old," Glance said. "Kirani's only going to get faster and stronger. He really wants to put his country on the map. We want to rewrite history."

If James is going to do that, he will have to battle Luguelin Santos all the way. Santos, who is a year younger and from Dominican Republic, won silver in 44.46sec. "When you are young you don't have anything to lose but you have so much to gain," James said, explaining how two teenagers had come to be top of the podium.

Santos finished yards behind James, who came round the final bend "like a train", as the stadium announcer put it. A Japanese bullet train, perhaps, certainly not a National Rail service. James, leaning forward as though he was running into a stiff wind, pulled away from the field in the final 100m, just as Johnson once did and as Usain Bolt still does. James has set all manner of records in the 200m as a youth and talk soon turned to whether he would fancy returning to that distance to match up with Bolt. "That's for the future," he said. "Right now I'm concentrating on the 400m."

The gap between James and Santos will shrink over time. The two of them have similar sorts of backgrounds. James grew up in "a small fishing community" called Gouyve, where his father works as a labourer. His talent was spotted when he won silver at the World Youth Championships in 2007, and Alabama University gave him an athletics scholarship. Santos has had a harder route. "The greatest pain I have suffered in my life didn't come from an injury," he has said. "It is called hunger. It was my companion when I started athletics. I was really poor, I didn't even have enough money to buy shoes and I would train barefoot. Those were really hard times. Sometimes my feet would bleed until I wanted to cry." His life is about to get very different.

Trinidad & Tobago's Lalonde Gordon took the bronze. Athletics fans should notice something a little odd about that top three. It was the first time since 1920 that an athlete from the USA had not won an Olympic medal in the 400m. In fact, a little look at the start list revealed something stranger still, and it was not just that the brilliant Belgian twins Kevin and Jonathan Borlée had been drawn in lanes one and eight, giving the line-up a certain symmetry. No, it was that not one runner from the USA made the final. That was an Olympic first, with the obvious exception of the 1980 Games in Moscow, when they did not send a team. The USA won clean-sweeps in the 400m at both the 2004 and 2008 Olympics and their monopoly on this event has been asstrong as the one McDonald's exerts over the sales of hamburgers in the Olympic site – until now.

Before James the last man to run sub-44sec was the last Olympic champion, LaShawn Merritt, and that was back in 2008. Merritt finished second to James at the world championships, after coming back from a two-year ban for a positive drugs test. He blamed it on a supplement called ExtenZe, which is euphemistically described as "promoting natural male enhancement". Having brazened out the ignominy that came with all that, Merritt pulled a hamstring during the heats and dropped out. Given the chorus of boos that Justin Gatlin received as he stepped up on to the podium to get his bronze medal for the 100m, one wonders whether anyone missed Merritt much. In James and Santos the sport has two new heroes, ones worth celebrating. After the semi-final James made a point of swapping his name-tag with Oscar Pistorius, a gracious act that won him a lot of admirers. "Oscar," he explained, "should be a huge inspiration for everybody, whether they are an athlete or not."

MondayToday may have been one big street party for the Grenadians but for the British it felt as if the hangover from the weekend was kicking in. Perri Shakes-Drayton was knocked out of the women's 400m hurdles. Her time of 55.19sec left her ninth overall. When the Czech Republic's Denisa Rosolova was disqualified, Shakes-Drayton was back in and when Rosolova was reinstated she was out again. It was a regular hokey cokey.

It was a blow but Shakes-Drayton's hopes were based entirely on the back of a single run at Crystal Palace, when she ran the third fastest time in the world this year. Other athletes with altogether more reason to expect success have also struggled. Just ask New Zealand's Valerie Adams, who had been on a two-year long winning streak until she lost the shot put final to Nadzeya Ostapchuk. She also created a little history, winning Belarus' first gold medal in athletics. They will be partying in Minsk too.

This article was amended on 7 August 2012. The original said that Luguelin Santos is from Dominica rather than Dominican Republic. This has been corrected.