Athletics | Noah Lyles Olympic 100m champion by five thousandths

(Paris) A showman determined to give athletics a boost, American sprinter Noah Lyles burst into the spotlight on the most prestigious of sporting stages, crowned Olympic champion in the 100m by five thousandths of a second at the Paris Games on Sunday evening.

Leaping as he entered the purple track of the Stade de France, under the eyes of American rapper Snoop Dogg, a regular spectator of the Olympic Games from one end of the French capital to the other, Lyles emerged victorious from a wildly contested and tense final: on the finish line, the eight sprinters were separated by only twelve hundredths of a second, and he only owes the Olympic gold to a very small lead over Jamaican Kishane Thompson, the revelation of world sprinting.

Both are credited with the same time: 9 sec 79 — a personal best for Lyles.

“It was a crazy moment. I really thought Kishane had won. I thought I was going to have to swallow my pride,” Lyles said. “And when I saw my name, I thought, ‘I did this against the best of the best, in the biggest competition, with the most pressure.’”

Another American, Fred Kerley, silver medalist at the Tokyo Games three years ago and since become 100m world champion in 2022, accompanies the new Olympic champion on the podium, third in 9 sec 81.

“It’s one of the best races I’ve been to in a long time,” Kerley praised.

Twenty years of waiting

Lyles allowed the United States to regain Olympic gold in the premier race that had eluded them for twenty years, the day after the disappointment experienced by Sha’Carri Richardson in the women’s 100m, beaten by the Saint Lucia sprinter Julien Alfred.

With Jamaican legend Usain Bolt between 2008 and 2016 and Italian surprise Marcell Jacobs in 2021 -5^e of Sunday night’s final in 9.85 seconds – the last American Olympic champion in the straight was Justin Gatlin in 2004.

With his nails painted and starred in the style of the US flag, his hair braided and decorated with white pearls, the Floridian sprinter is thinking much bigger in Paris. Having won a resounding hat-trick at the World Championships in Budapest last summer, 100m, 200m and 4x100m, he is even aiming for a quadruple at the Stade de France: 100m, 200m – his favourite race –, 4x100m and 4x400m – even if he is not a specialist in them. A challenge that even Bolt has never taken on.

At 27, Lyles had already established himself as one of the faces of world athletics, with his Hungarian hat-trick, his collection of six world titles since 2019, and his starring role in the Netflix series “Sprint,” which follows the world’s fastest athletes.

But he lacked Olympic consecration, since the 2021 Olympics had not smiled on him. In a COVID-19 bubble and a desperately empty stadium, a thousand miles from his sense of spectacle, caught up in a depressive episode as he has been subject to since childhood, he had only been able to obtain the bronze medal in the 200m, for which he was nevertheless the favorite.

Thompson as Bolt’s heir

“I don’t like this medal. It keeps my inner fire burning to do better,” said Lyles, who trains in his native Florida in Lance Brauman’s group in Clermont, one of the most competitive in the world.

“He’s a performer, he likes the limelight, the attention, the spectacle. There was none of that in Tokyo. He was a fish out of water,” says his mental coach Diana McNab.

Three years later, Paris, won over on all sides by Olympic fervor, enjoyed Lyles’ first golden act. The show will resume on Monday evening in the series of the half-lap of the track.

How does he see the 200m? “I’m going to win. When I come out of the bend, they’ll be desperate,” he dares, having just become an Olympic champion.

“Sport needs that, man, we need a personality,” Bolt said last year after a race in Jamaica.

A sprinting revelation at 23, Thompson came very close to winning the greatest of rewards in his very first international championship.

But the athlete with the figure of a mirror cabinet, who remains the fastest man of the season with his 9.77 seconds run at the Jamaican selections, has everything to take up the torch left by Bolt.