Olympics LIVE: Keely Hodgkinson wins superb 800m gold as Armand Duplantis breaks pole vault world record

Qin Haiyang appeared to hit back at comments from rival Adam Peaty as he declared any “doubt” around China’s swimming golds at Paris 2024 is a “joke”.

Qin was implicated in a report from the New York Times published before the Olympics which claimed that the World Anti-Doping agency (Wada) took no action when 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for the banned performance enhancing drug trimetazidine (TMZ) in 2021.

The swimmers were allowed to compete at the Tokyo Olympics when Wada accepted the findings of a Chinese investigation that the results were due to contamination from a hotel kitchen, and 11, including the 25-year-old Qin, have competed in Paris.

Molly Caudery broke down in tears after seeing her Olympics dreams shattered at the Stade de France as she failed to clear a height in the women’s pole vault qualification.

The 24-year-old from Truro was tipped as a gold medal contender after winning the World Indoor Championships earlier this year as well as breaking the British record with a jump of 4.92m, making her the best performer of 2024.

Electing to start at a height of 4.55m, Caudery failed on all three attempts, missing out on a place in the final, where those who cleared 4.40m went through.

They still held hands, beamed wide smiles, and stepped onto the podium as one. Not for gold, despite leading for the majority of the race, or for silver, despite being initially declared runners-up, but for bronze, third in a three-team sprint finish separated by one-hundredth of a second on the line. A golden morning in Paris turned into devastation for Great Britain, as the reigning champions in the triathlon mixed relay lost their crownand settled for the minor medal by the barest of margins.

The result was changed after an investigation. A review of the photo finish quickly found Beth Potter was beaten to second by the indefatigable American Taylor Knibb after Germany’s Laura Lindemann sprinted to the gold that had been within Team GB’s grasp for so long. They had set out hard, with Alex Yee, Georgia Taylor-Brown, Sam Dickinson and then Potter stretching Great Britain’s lead to 12 seconds before the world champion was reeled in on the bike and fell behind on the run.

Potter tried to find a late surge but Lindemann was too strong, earning world champions Germany the Olympic title. “Photo finish” flashed up next to Great Britain and the United States but someone controlling the scoreboard was too quick in declaring the result. As the teams were lining up in the wrong places for the medal presentation, World Triathlon reviewed the photo finish and found Knibb had crossed the line first with her chest. When Team GB saw the evidence, they had no complaints about the decision.

So problematic is the beam that in the team events, a performance cannot be judged until the beam stage is complete, because of the chance of a slip.

But the Olympic final took it to a new level, with four of the eight finalists slipping and at least having to put their hands on the plank to steady themselves, if not tumbling off altogether.

Italian Alica D’Amato claimed the gold medal with a clean routine, even if the difficulty was not especially high, as Biles and her teammate Sunisa Lee fell off the bar.

Great Britain’s long-awaited return to the women’s team sprint battle at an Olympic Games ended with gold as Emma Finucane, Katy Marchant and Sophie Capewell broke the world record three times on a perfect night.

After failing to even qualify in this event since London 2012, Team GB set a new benchmark in every round, the last of them a time of 45.186 seconds which saw them beat New Zealand by five tenths of a second to claim Britain’s first ever Olympic women’s team sprint medal.

“It doesn’t get much better than that,” said Marchant, the 31-year-old who flew the women’s sprint flag alone for Britain in Rio and Tokyo.

The 2024 Olympic Games is underway in Paris, where the United States are once again favourites to top the medal table at the end of the 17-day festival of sport.

The USA have finished on top of the table at 18 of the 29 summer Olympics, including the very first in Athens in 1896, and six of the past seven stretching back to America’s home Games in Atlanta in 1996. China punctured that streak in Beijing in 2008, and are proving stiff competition again after finishing one short of America’s 39 golds in Tokyothree years ago. Hosts Japan finished third last time ahead of Great Britain in fourth.

Josh Kerr’s 1500m final battle with Jakob Ingebrigtsen will be one of the highlights of tomorrow.

Josh Kerr vowed to deliver a 1500 metres showdown for the ages after seeing himself through to the gold medal race second behind Norwegian arch-nemesis Jakob Ingebrigtsen in their semi-final.

Tuesday night’s battle is one of the most hotly-anticipated events of the Paris Olympics, the boiling point after years of pot-stirring between the bitter rivals, whose relationship World Athletics president Lord Coeearlier in the week described as “probably not a friendship made in heaven”.

The pair seemed to exchange a glance at the finish line, Ingebrigtsen first in 3:32.38 then Kerr in in 3:32.46 as they closed the curtain on the dress rehearsal for their grand finale.

She’s human after all. Simone Biles settled for fifth in the beam final in Paris, before returning to deliver a mesmeric floor routine to claim a silver medal in what could be her final ever appearance at the Olympics.

A captivated audience locked in on Biles’ final two performances of these enthralling Games, with the American superstar initially slipping off the perilous beam to miss out on a medal. But the gutsy Biles would return, with her trademark tumbling enough for an 11th Olympic medal behind only Brazil’s brilliant Rebeca Andrade in the floor final.

The American superstar had earlier turned away with a grimace after learning her beam score, 13.100, which included a 0.3 penalty. And it proved to be a challenging afternoon following redemption and a third Olympic gold after her statement performance in the vault on Saturday. But the beam provided a telling reminder that gymnastics is a sport of fine margins as Alice D’Amato claimed a famous gold for Italy.