Noah Lyles always said he was a star. He told it to everyone who would listen, from coaches to fellow athletes to the world via the Netflix film Sprint. Well, now they’ll have to believe him, because on a beautiful soft powdery blue evening in Saint-Denis, Lyles pulled off one of the most surprising Olympic sprint finals of all time, winning the gold medal in the men’s 100 meters at Paris 2024.
Lyles, the US and world No. 1, has been an extraordinary presence in the build-up to this race. He’s almost overwhelmingly charming in person, all superstar polish and utterly disarming honesty about his own shortcomings, his own super strengths, always on, always commanding the main stage. By the time he reached the starting line in Paris for the men’s final – along with the women’s race, the headline act of this entire two-week circus – there was a sense of a man teetering on the edge. But of what, exactly?
In the event, it took an extraordinary amount of willpower to seize the moment. With 50 meters to go in Paris, Lyles was in seventh place. The day was beginning to stretch and fray at the edges, to take on a different shape in those strangely silent seconds at the halfway point of the race.
Lyles could have started to lose his forward momentum. Instead, he produced a stunning slingshot finish, ripping through the field and winning the race by five thousandths of a second. So the Olympics, ever so hungry for product, light, heat, have a new star.
Lyles is 27. These are his Games, his moment in the spotlight, the perfect star and the perfect podium. In the moments before the race, the Stade de France was bathed in a spectacular light show. A middle-aged man in sunglasses had appeared on the big screen to DJ, as if that alone could add to the glamour, the electricity of the moment.
The real challenge for Lyles in Paris was Kishane Thompson of Jamaica, a great emerging talent. Thompson is so new at this level that he doesn’t even have a proper biography on the International Olympic Committee website (it actually says: Gender: Male. Position: Athlete).
But he had looked great in the semifinals, running like the air was, frankly, a little too thin for his taste. On Sunday night, he came out and roared like a lion. Lyles did something wild, running around the track, bouncing and swirling, grabbing big handfuls of air. Hmm. Was that a good idea? Was it really worth doing anything else at this point?
It is no secret that there is a wider pressure at stake here. Seb Coe and World Athletics always had a plan for these Olympics. The whole staging is essentially a product relaunch for athletics as a whole.
The epic years of Cold War opposition are long gone, when sprint records were seen as a kind of barometer of human progress, like the arms race or the moon landings. Usain Bolt’s genius kept the circus going. But in reality, since Rio 2016, this spectacle has become second-rate.
It shouldn’t be this way. Sprinting is a perfect spectator sport, so simple, so accessible. This is primal stuff. People run. People run fast. Who’s the fastest human? But on a talent-versus-fame scale, the world’s best sprinters are also among the world’s least recognizable elite athletes.
The answer is to create stars. And World Athletics has invested. Just this week, Coe was heard in Paris talking about Sprint, which he is executive producer of, and boasting about its status as the sixth most-watched entity on the platform. It’s a fine piece of work, but it’s also about turning its two most marketable properties, Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson, into global stars, a two-pronged attack that’s been attached to these Games.
Unfortunately, life is what happens while you’re making plans. There was an indelible glory in Julien Alfred’s women’s 100m gold on Saturday night, a first-ever medal for St Lucia. But there was also a touch of mischief. The best thing about sport is that it just doesn’t go according to script.
So we come to Lyles and the men’s race. The sky above the roof’s edge was still pink as the athletes knelt by their blocks. Sprinters come in many different genres. Most follow the pattern of the angry avenger, always on the hunt for something. Then we have the hunted, the sprinter who seems to be fleeing instead. Britain’s newest star, Louie Hinchliffe, runs as if he’s being chased by a swarm of bees.
Thompson is a classic floater, the sprinter who will kill you with grace. That easy movement is an act of aggression in its own way, always telling you about the power in reserve. Lyles is a hybrid. He moves with prodigious grace, has an astonishing efficiency once he is past his drive phase, all the way to full flow.
His weakness is his start, which was again terrible. Thomson was slowly going away, eating the air in front of him, his own moment approaching. At that moment something strange happened, the whole field seemed to tense up, to go backwards as he moved with supernatural speed. Only Lyles didn’t. He’s talked about this for so long, his legend sketched out in plain sight. It took 30 paces to make it happen. From here the future seems wide open.