Does Ageless Justin Gatlin Have Enough Left to Dethrone Hampered Usain Bolt?

At an age when athletes in most sports are considering retirement, U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin is hitting his stride better than ever.

At the U.S. Track and Field Trials on Sunday in Eugene, Oregon, 34-year-old Gatlin qualified for the Olympics by running the men's 100-meter final in 9.80 seconds. Not only did he win the race, he recorded the fastest time by anyone in the world thus far this year.

Courtesy of NBC Olympics, here is the race in its entirety. Don't blink:

"Crying inside," Gatlin told Andrew Keh of the New York Times about the feeling of participating in the Olympics for the third time in his career. "Joy on the outside. But when I got down on one knee after I crossed the finish line, it was relief, crying inside, happy."

According to Bill Vilona of the Pensacola News Journal, the 34-year-old Gatlin became the oldest U.S. sprinter to qualify for the Olympics in more than a century. A testament to how far past his prime Gatlin is supposed to be by now, 20-year-old Trayvon Bromell and 22-year-old Marvin Bracy finished second and third in the race, respectively.

Back when he was their age—before the four-year doping ban that kept him from competing during his prime—Gatlin was the best in the world.

At 22, Gatlin won gold in the 2004 Olympics in the men's 100-meter dash with a time of 9.85 seconds—0.05 seconds slower than what he just ran in Eugene. One year later at the World Championships in Helsinki, Finland, he won gold in both the 100-meter (9.88 seconds) and the 200-meter races, besting an unknown 18-year-old kid named Usain Bolt in the latter.

GREG BAKER/Getty Images

Few have been able to beat Bolt in any race since then. His name has become synonymous with sprinting, winning gold in both the 100- and 200-meter races at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, as well as the 2009, 2013 and 2015 World Championships. Were it not for a false start in the finals of the 100 at the 2011 World Championships, the man would be undefeated in both events for the better part of a decade.

Not satisfied with simply breaking world records in sprinting, though, Bolt nearly broke the internet over the weekend with news of the hamstring injury that will keep him out of the Jamaican Olympic trials.

Bolt has submitted a medical exemption and intends to still qualify via the London Anniversary Games on July 22, but this is the most groundbreaking news on the mortality of an international juggernaut since Rocky Balboa cut Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

Even if Bolt does qualify and is healthy enough to run in Rio, the door has been opened for the second-best sprinter in the world.

Gatlin won silver behind Bolt's gold in the 100-meter finals at both the 2013 and 2015 World Championships. In 2015, he finished just 0.01 seconds behind Bolt and 0.12 seconds ahead of bronze medalist Bromell, who Gatlin just bested Sunday night.

If the Jamaican superstar is anything less than 100 percent for Rio, the gold medal is Gatlin's for the taking.

Should he pull it off, it would go down as one of the best comeback/redemption stories in Olympic history. To even get to this point after being banned from the sport for four years is remarkable enough, but to actually be crowned the fastest man in the world 12 years after first receiving that title would be almost unfathomable.