Andrea Vargas, who finished fifth at the 2019 World Cup, could not reach the final of the 100-meter hurdles Sunday and was eliminated in the semifinals at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games by just two hundredths of second.
The great hope of Tico athletics was third in her semifinal series, with a time of 12 seconds and 69 hundredths, her best mark so far this season and approaching the Costa Rican record, the 12.64 she ran two years ago in the Qatari capital.
To enter the final directly, however, she had to be in the first two positions of one of the three semifinals. The other two tickets were distributed for the two best remaining times and Vargas did not quality.
Overall, she finished with the ninth best time, just behind the eight finalists.
Vargas, 25, was just two hundredths behind the eighth place of the U.S. American Gabriele Cunningham (12.67), who marked the limit of the finalists.
Costa Rica will have to keep waiting to get its first Olympic medal in athletics.
Until now, all the medals for the country came in swimming, thanks to Silvia Poll (silver in 200 m free in Seoul-1988) and her sister Claudia Poll (gold in 200 m free in Atlanta-1996, bronze in 200 m free in Sydney-2000 and bronze in the 400m freestyle in Sydney).
The fastest of the semifinals was the Puerto Rican Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, a new phenom of the event, who set the sixth-best time in history by running this round in 12 seconds and 26 hundredths, just six hundredths behind the world record of the U.S. American Kendra Harrison (12.20 since 2016).
