In a fraction of a blink, Noah Lyles becomes an Olympic legend (2024)

SAINT-DENIS, France — The 100 meters at the Olympics takes a blink. Cross the finish line as the eyelid closes, and you’re a legend. Wait till the eyelid opens, and you’re an afterthought. What a way to determine legacies.

On Sunday night, when eight sprinters crossed the finish line at Stade de France — all seemingly on that same down blink — legacies couldn’t be determined by the naked eye. Chests heaving, nearly the entirety of the field looked at the scoreboard, yearning for answers. Aside seven of their names sat a single word in all caps: PHOTO.

Poll the nearly 80,000 people who packed the place who won, and it might have been an even split. Cameras had to do the work. As the sprinters mingled to try to unfray their nerves, American Noah Lyles approached Jamaican Kishane Thompson.

“Bro,” Lyles told Thompson. “I think you got that one, big dog.”

The first runner — it looked to be Thompson or Lyles, but who’s to say? — crossed the line in 9.79 seconds. The last finished in 9.91. It took 28 seconds — nearly three times as long as the race — to show the result.

“I was not sure,” Thompson said. “It was that close.”

When the scoreboard finally revealed whose life would change irrecoverably, Lyles’s name popped to the top. His time registered on the scoreboard as the same as Thompson’s: 9.79 seconds. Digital photography determined the difference needed another decimal place: Lyles crossed in 9.784 seconds, Thompson in 9.789.

Do the math. That’s five thousandths of a second between gold and silver. American Fred Kerley crossed in 9.81 seconds. It was good only for bronze.

Whatever the margin, there was the moment Lyles saw his name. He is full of brashness and bravado. The magnitude of the accomplishment was almost knee-buckling.

“I’m going to be honest: I wasn’t ready to see it,” Lyles said. “And that’s the first time I’ve ever said that in my head. Like, I wasn’t ready to see it.”

No matter that he had prepared for so many of his 27 years to see just that: gold medal, Olympic champion, world’s fastest human. A dozen years ago as a teenager, he watched the London Olympics from his Alexandria, Va., home. He saw Jamaican icon Usain Bolt win gold in both the 100 and 200 meters. He boldly wanted — rather, he boldly decided — to do the same.

“It feels good to back it up,” Lyles said.

Hold on. He’s only halfway there. But what a half.

The Paris Olympics already had been thrilling. The final week began with an event that will be hard to dislodge from the best of the competition, a race that was nothing short of historic. The 100 always has been — and should always be — a marquee event at the Olympics. After something of a lull in recent years, Sunday night restored that status.

What is a more basic judge of human athletic capability than who can cover a short distance in the least amount of time? Sprinting invites preening and showmanship, trash-talking and intimidation. The race lasts 10 seconds. The show is much longer.

Bolt, as much as any figure in history, leaned into it all, casting himself as a distinct character. He set the world record at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, all but prancing to the finish line, inviting the world to marvel at his superiority. He won again in London and four years later in Rio de Janeiro, too. He seemed untouchable — not just when he ran but for the sprinters chasing his ghost.

So in the years since Bolt’s retirement in 2017, no one has stepped in — or, rather, no one has strutted forward — and seized the Alpha Male role on the men’s side. Maybe that changed Sunday night, both because of how the race played out and who won it.

Part of Lyles’s initial reaction to winning gold by five-thousandths of a second was, “Dang, I’m amazing.” He meant it, and he was unafraid to say so. That’s a champion sprinter playing the role.

When the field was introduced for the evening’s final event, each sprinter put his stamp on the moment. Thompson, whose 9.77-second victory at the Jamaican trials was the fastest time of the year, let out a roar from his thick, 6-foot-1 frame.

By comparison, that was mundane. Lyles, running from Lane 7, was introduced next-to-last. With a sunglass-wearing, leather-jacketed DJ thumping heavy bass lines through the stadium, Lyles bounded and leaped into the arena, bouncing almost 30 yards down the track.

Lyles had arrived. The show could start.

“Noah Lyles is Noah Lyles,” said Lance Brauman, Lyles’s longtime coach. “He needs to do what he does. He’s not your normal guy, so you can’t treat him like a normal guy. You got to let him do the things he does to get excited.”

Thompson, the betting favorite, ran from Lane 4, three spots to Lyles’s left. But there was danger everywhere. Oblique Seville of Jamaica came out of the semifinals with a 9.81, the third-fastest time in the world this year — matching Lyles’s personal best. Kerley lurked.

“We started the season, a lot of people were saying it’s going to be a slow year in the 100,” Lyles said. “Well, it wasn’t no slow year in the 100!”

When the gun went off, Lyles’s reaction time matched the slowest in the field. But by midway through the race, he had reestablished himself.

“I was like, ‘Okay, we’re in the mix,’” Brauman said. “… At 80 [meters], I was like, ‘Holy cow, he’s right there.’”

Imagine working day after day, week after week — over years — to have your fate determined by an amount of time and space that’s not perceptible to the human eye. That was Noah Lyles — that was the entire 100-meter field — on Sunday night at the Paris Olympics. Consider this, too: Seville finished eighth in 9.91 seconds. Never had an entire field, unaided by wind, finished the 100 in less than 10 seconds.

“Beside Usain Bolt, nobody has run faster in an Olympic race than what they just did today,” Baumann said. “And that will go down as the closest final in the history of the Olympic Games. Put that into context. That means something to me.”

It should mean something to every human who watched it. Boundaries are being pushed. Three years ago, Noah Lyles left Tokyo — an Olympics for which he did not qualify in the 100 — crushed by the fact he won only bronze in the 200.

On Sunday, his life changed because he was five-thousandths of a second faster than another man. He ripped off the bib bearing his name and held it to the crowd. LYLES, it blared.

“Here I am: First Olympics in the 100, now the Olympic champion,” Lyles said. “And you know, having that title not just at world championships but at the Olympics — of the world’s fastest man.”

By a mile or a millisecond, that’s the title he earned. No one can take that from him. No one can take a remarkable night from anyone who saw it, 9.784 seconds that somehow could fill hours — rather, years — of conversation.