Idowu falls short of his dream

End of the dream: Phillips Idowu had to make do with a silver medal after failing to live up to his pre-Games billing in today's Beijing triple jump final. His longest leap was 17.62

Phillips Idowu's dream of becoming Olympic champion died here in a soggy Bird's Nest Stadium and not even the annexation of a silver medal was going to console the Hackney athlete who believed it was his destiny to strike gold.

The 29-year-old discovered, as many athletes down the years have before him, that supreme form during an entire season does not count for much when sport's biggest prize is at stake.

For although the man who had gone unbeaten all year in nine competitions by no means let himself down, as he produced his best jump of the whole summer, 17.62 metres, he still found it was not enough to stop Portugal's Nelson Evora, a man he has beaten several times this summer, delivering sublime jumps exactly when they mattered.

Twice, Idowu took the lead as befits a man completely high on confidence.

Twice, Evora, the man who also lifted himself on the big occasion last year to win the world title in Osaka, took it away from him with the sort of leaps he had kept hidden all year.

Idowu arrived here claiming he felt bullet-proof, like Superman, but when the pressure was at its maximum, he was a man who found he could not fly.

On his last attempt, he urged all 90,000 in the stadium to clap him to one final glorious leap to try to overhaul Evora but he tried almost too hard, collapsing on the jump phase and plummeting into the wet sand, quite crestfallen.

It was impossible not to feel sympathy for Idowu. One of the most popular and hard-working members of the British team, this had looked likely to be his moment to take a giant hop, step and jump towards being one of the poster athletes for the 2012 London Games in the way Christine Ohuruogu, the 400m star who shares the same north London training venue as him at Lee Valley, did two nights ago.

The realisation of his first defeat since the World Championship hit him hard; he threw the headband which covers his distinctive red barnet to the floor and looked up to see his coach Aston Moore in the stands. Darren Campbell, an old British team-mate who knows what it is like to have an individual gold medal snatched away, tried to comfort him, putting an arm around him.

A Union flag was draped over his shoulders but Idowu looked as if he wished it could be anywhere else.

"I feel this is my destiny," Idowu said before the event, while talking about being in the sort of shape to attack the world record. But the holder of that mark, Jonathan Edwards, the man under whose shadow he has always had to live, warned some time ago that Idowu should be thinking more of simply winning the competition rather than thinking of landmarks.

Indeed, Edwards, the last British winner of this event in 2000, identified Evora's speed through the jump and big meeting temperament as the biggest threat to the Briton.

Idowu was supposed to have his number, though. In the form of his life, he had blown the Ivory Coast-born Evora away during the world indoor championships in Valencia in March.

A rain-sodden night at the Bird's Nest had done its worst by the time the distinctive figure took the big stage and though he has been criticised in the past for being maddeningly inconsistent and perhaps wanting a little in mental fortitude on the biggest occasion, there was no evidence of stage fright.

Idowu's first leap appeared a dominant statement of intent as he stretched out, without seeming to be over-extending himself, to 17.51m, a good 20 centimetres more than anyone else could summon in the first round.

Yet Evora, in the second round, hit the board with perfect precision to snatch the lead by five centimetres.

Idowu has not been in this uncomfortable position of trailing many times this season but the sign that he has become an athlete to be reckoned with showed up again in the third round, when he added three centimetres to the lead with a leap of 17.62m. As soon as he landed, he gave a little hop of delight and punched the air, confident it could be decisive.

It is at this point in a competition when it would have been easy to convince himself that Evora might find it hard to recover a second time as the field was reduced to eight with just three jumps left and, inwardly, it must have been a crushing blow, just before he was about to jump again to see Evora leap out to 17.67m.

Of course, he still had the ability to better it because he had cleared more than 17.75m in the indoor season but now his form was becoming increasingly ragged as he tried to respond.

Idowu's fourth effort would have bettered Evora's mark but it was a clear no-jump and his penultimate jump saw him fall 41 centimetres short.

It was all slipping away. The man whose body is pierced by more metal than you would find in a car showroom will now take back home to Hackney a lump more - but what a shame it won't be the precious stuff he had so coveted.

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