USA’s Lyles grabs 100m Olympic gold

PARIS (France): USA’s Noah Lyles brought his ‘main character energy’ to the Paris Games and it paid off as he ran the 100m race of his life to take the Olympic gold in front of a mesmerized crowd at the Stade de France on Sunday.

In the deepest men’s 100m race of all time, the six-time world gold medallist dipped to victory in a PB of 9.79, pipping Jamaica’s world leader Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second.

USA’s 2022 world champion and Tokyo Olympic silver medallist Fred Kerley bagged bronze, clocking 9.81 -- 0.01 ahead of Akani Simbine in a South African record. There were best marks-for-place for Simbine in fourth, as well as Italy’s defending champion Marcell Jacobs in fifth (9.85), Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo in sixth (9.86 NR), USA’s Kenny Bednarek in seventh (9.88) and Jamaica’s Oblique Seville (9.91) in eighth. In fact, it was the first time that eight men have finished sub-10 in the same wind-legal race and 0.12 is the smallest ever gap between first and eighth in an Olympic or world men’s 100m final.

“If you don’t have main character energy, then track and field ain’t for you,” Lyles had insisted in an interview on the new Netflix docuseries SPRINT. He used a lot of that energy during his entrance for the final, jumping up and down and running onto the track before the race. But once in the blocks, he looked focused --determined to add an Olympic title to the 200m bronze he gained in Tokyo and his six world crowns claimed between 2019 and 2023.