USA sprinter Noah Lyles won the men’s 100m title at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games by the smallest of margins in a dramatic photo finish.
The 27-year-old took gold ahead of Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second as both sprinters finished with a time of 9.79 seconds at the Stade de France.
Lyles’ official time was 9.784 with Thompson finishing with a time of 9.789, while USA’s Fred Kerley took bronze as he clocked 9.81 seconds.
World sprint champion Noah Lyles, who claimed 100m and 200m gold last year in Budapest, thumped his chest at the start line and pumped up the crowd, but, alongside Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, got out to the slowest start with a 0.178 reaction time.
But he spectacularly recovered to narrowly edge out Olympic debutant Thompson, who had led most of the race.
Lyles’ remarkable victory begins his quest to win four gold medals in Paris with the 200m and relay events to come.
The defending champion from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Italy’s Lamont Marcell Jacobs, finished fifth with just 0.12 seconds separating the eight finalists.
Earlier, Team GB sprinters Louie Hinchliffe and Zharnel Hughes saw their bid for Olympic 100m gold come to an end in the semi-finals.
Lyles, who became the first American 100m Olympic champion since Justin Gatlin at Athens in 2004, revealed he thought Thompson had beaten him in their photo finish.
Lyles said: “I knew that when the time came, for me to be able to say ‘this is the final, this is where I need to put it together’ I was going to do it.
“I did think [Thompson] had it at the end. I went up to him after, while we were waiting, and I even said ‘I think you’ve got that, good going’, and then my name popped up and I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, I’m amazing’.
“I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t ready to see it [his name] and that’s the first time I’ve ever said that. I wasn’t ready to see it.
“He was quite a few lanes down, he was in four, I was in seven so it was hard for me to picture where we were.”