SAINT-DENIS, France — Noah Lyles paced on the far end of the track, hands folded over the top of his head, wistfully looking up at a scoreboard that would, sooner or later, flash an answer he’s been seeking over three sweat-soaked years.
Was all that toil since the last Olympics — all the work on the practice track and in the weight room in the name of finding a centimeter here or a millisecond there — really going to be worth all the trouble?
Ten seconds passed, then 20. Then, nearly 30. And then, the answer popped up.
Yes, Lyles is the 100-meter champion at the Paris Olympics. The World’s Fastest Man.
Just not by very much.
The American showman edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson on Sunday by five-thousandths of a second — that’s .005 of one tick of the clock — in a race for the ages.
The final tally in this one: Lyles 9.784 seconds, Thompson 9.789.
The new champion said that before he left for Paris, one of his physio guys ensured him this race would be a squeaker.
“He said, ‘This is how close first and second are going to be,’” Lyles said as he pinched his thumb and his forefinger together so they were almost touching. “I can’t believe how right he was.”
For perspective, the blink of an eye takes, on average, .1 second. That was 20 times longer than the gap between first and second.
It was so close, that when the sprinters crossed the line and the word “Photo” popped up next to the names of Lyles, Thompson and five others in the eight-man field, Lyles walked over to the Jamaican and said “I think you got the Olympics dog.”
Thompson, who raced three lanes to the left of Lyles and had no clue where he was on the track, wasn’t convinced.
“I was, ‘Wow, I’m not even sure, because it was that close,’” the Jamaican said.
Time would tell. It always does. When Lyles’ name came up first, he snatched his name tag off the front of his bib and held it to the sky. Moments later, he shouted at the TV camera: “America, I told you I got this!”
The first four racers were separated by less than .03. The top seven all finished within .09 of each other.
America’s Fred Kerley came in third at 9.81. “That’s probably one of the most beautiful races I’ve been in,” he said.
In the photo finish, Kerley’s orange shoe crossed the line before anyone, or anything. But it’s the chest breaking the barrier that counts. Lyles’ chest crossed first.
This was the closest 1-2 finish in the 100 since at least Moscow in 1980 — or maybe even ever.
Back then, Britain’s Allan Wells narrowly beat Silvio Leonard in an era when the electronic timers didn’t go into the thousandths of a second. The same was true in 1932, when Eddie Tolan won the Olympics’ first ever photo finish.
Lyles conceded that during the excruciating wait, he was pretty sure he had dipped his chest just a tad too soon. Dipping, it turns out, is one of the few things he doesn’t work on over and over again at his training track in Florida.
“But I would say I have a decent history with dipping,” he said, recalling races he won in high school and as a junior.
The 9.784 marked a new personal best for Lyles and made him the first American champion in the marquee race at the Olympics since Justin Gatlin in 2004.
Lyles is hoping to go even bigger than that, and maybe take this sport back to a day when it was Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses lighting up the track — a must-see affair, the likes of which Lyles headlined in front of around 80,000 on a warm night at the Stade de France.
The mission started after Lyles settled for a bronze medal in Tokyo in his favorite — and then, only — sprint, the 200. Those COVID-impacted Games were a terrible experience for Lyles. He rededicated himself to bettering his mental health, but also looked for a new mission — the 100 meters and, with it, a chance at track immortality.
The practice was tough for a sprinter never known as a great starter, but he stuck with it. When he won the world championships last year, then backed it up by winning the 200, his goal for Paris was very much in sight.
But when he came into the Olympic final having finished second in both his qualifying races and staring across at one sprinter who had run faster than him this year — Thompson — and another who had beaten him twice this year — Jamaica’s Oblique Seville — he knew this would be no coronation.
Thompson added another roadblock when, during the introduction, he let out a primal scream, the likes of which Lyles has been unleashing in some of his biggest races.
“I thought ‘Man, that’s my thing, that’s crazy,’” Lyles said.
Lyles galloped and leapt about 20 yards down the track before returning to the starting line, where the runners waited some three minutes for the gun to finally sound.
It was worth the wait.
Now, the question that could be debated for years is: What was the difference in this one?
Could it have been Lyles’ closing speed and that lean into the line that he thought was mistimed?
Was it his ability to stay in reach of everyone among this straight line of sprinters over the first 60 meters — a skill he’s been working on in tedious practice after practice since he took on the shorter sprint?
The answer: all that and more.
“Everyone in the field came out knowing they could win this race,” Lyles said.
It took 9.784 seconds, then about 30 seconds more, for the scoreboard to flash the name of the man who actually did.
“Seeing that name, I was like ‘Oh my gosh, there it is!’” Lyles said.
Gold (and bronze) for Ukrainian high jumpers
Yaroslava Mahuchikh won Olympic gold in the high jump for her war-torn country of Ukraine and, as a bonus, had company. Her teammate Iryna Gerashchenko won the bronze and the teammates hopped, skipped and jumped around the track parading their blue-and-yellow flags in a heartfelt celebration.
Mahuchikh needed fewer tries to clear the winning height of 2 meters than Australia’s Nicola Olyslagers, and so, added the sport’s biggest prize of all — Olympic gold — to her world championship and world record.
Kerr vs Ingebrigtsen is a go for heated men’s 1,500
The best rivalry in track will culminate Tuesday when reigning world champion Josh Kerr of Britain takes on defending Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway.
They squared off in Sunday’s semifinal, too, and Ingebrigtsen edged out the Brit, looking over to him twice as they surged down the homestretch, to win a race that felt like it meant more than it should have in 3:32.38.
“They should be expecting one of the most vicious and hardest 1,500s the sport’s seen in a very long time,” Kerr said.
Did Ingebrigtsen agree?
“Depends who you ask, maybe,” he said. “I mean, racing is what you want it to be.”
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