BATON ROUGE – The British Olympic Association announced Wednesday that LSU’s junior sprinter Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake is among 80 track and field athletes competing for Team GB at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August as he will run the 200-meter dash and join the 4×100-meter relay pool in his Olympics debut.
Mitchell-Blake is the ninth LSU Track & Field athlete confirmed to compete at the Rio Olympics and the third member of LSU’s 2016 team along with Canadian Chanice Chase and Jamaican Fitzroy Dunkley.
British Olympic Association Announcement
Rounding out LSU’s Olympians this summer are a host of former NCAA Champions and All-Americans, including Damar Forbes (long jump), Natoya Goule (800 meters) and Nickiesha Wilson (100 hurdles) from Jamaica; Kelly-Ann Baptiste (100 meters, 4×100 relay) and Richard Thompson (100 meters, 4×100 relay) from Trinidad & Tobago; and Gabriel Mvumvure (100 meters) from Zimbabwe.
Who Jah Bless no man curse. Ecstatic to say I have been selected to represent @BritAthletics at the Rio Olympics. 🇬🇧🇧🇷
— Nethaneel M-B (@WurldOfBlake) July 13, 2016
Mitchell-Blake proved his fitness to the British Olympic Association on Friday at the European Athletics Championships in Amsterdam where he ran 20.46 seconds (-1.1) in the semifinals and 20.60 (-0.9) for fifth place in the men’s 200-meter final. It was Mitchell-Blake’s first competition in nearly one month when he suffered a hamstring injury while running the anchor leg of LSU’s NCAA Champion 4×100-meter relay team at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, on June 10.
Mitchell-Blake is now set to make his Olympics debut with Chase, Dunkley, Goule and Mvumvure; while Baptiste makes her fourth Olympics appearance, Thompson and Wilson both make their third and Forbes makes his second when they compete in Rio de Janeiro beginning Aug. 12.
Mitchell-Blake has enjoyed a breakout junior season in 2016 that has seen him be selected the SEC Men’s Outdoor Runner of the Year and Men’s South Central Region Track Athlete of the Year of the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association. He has also been crowned an NCAA Champion, four-time SEC Champion and three-time All-American with his performance for the Tigers this season.
Mitchell-Blake proved to be the star of this year’s SEC Championships as he won the SEC Commissioners Trophy as the top men’s scorer in the meet with 22.5 points as a three-time SEC Champion for the weekend. He not only anchored the Tigers to a meet record in winning the men’s 4×100-meter relay, but he also completed the sprint sweep of 100-meter and 200-meter titles with his efforts.
Mitchell-Blake teamed with freshman Jaron Flournoy, junior Renard Howell and junior Tremayne Acy to lower their NCAA-leading time in the event to 38.33 to set a new SEC meet record in the sprint relay. He later ran a wind-legal 10.16 (+1.0) to be crowned the SEC Champion in the 100-meter dash before ending the meet in style with a personal best sub-20-second time of 19.95 (+0.4) to win the 200 meters.
He came away from the SEC Championship as one of the top-10 200-meter sprinters in collegiate history as his 19.95 personal best tied for the No. 7 spot on the NCAA’s all-time list. LSU’s meet-record time of 38.33 also cracked the NCAA Top 10 list all-time as the No. 8-ranked time in collegiate history, smashing Texas A&M’s previous meet record of 38.50 from 2014.
Not only that, but Mitchell-Blake’s 19.95 is the second-fastest 200 meters in British history as the London native trails only the British record of 19.94 set by John Regis at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.
Mitchell-Blake followed his performance at the SEC Championships by anchoring the Tigers to the NCAA Championship in the 4×100 relay as they smashed the Hayward Field record at the University of Oregon with the winning time of 38.42 in the national final. He also earned All-America honors in the men’s 100-meter dash as an NCAA finalist for the first time in his event.