SI:AM | The Men’s 100m Exceeded Its Enormous Hype

It took less than 10 seconds to complete, but it’ll be dissected forever.

Sunday’s 100m final provided an unbelievable finish. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I still can’t stop thinking about the photo finish in the men’s 100 meters.

In today’s SI:AM:

🥇 Noah Lyles backs up the trash talk
🥇 Bobby Finke’s streak-saving win
🥇 Another honor for Scheffler

An all-time great race

The Olympic 100 meters is perhaps the most famous single sporting event on Earth. The appeal is obvious: It’s eight of the world’s best competing in a straightforward test of pure speed. The fact that it only occurs once every four years heightens the drama. It can feel strange to place so much emphasis on a race that is over so quickly, but Sunday’s men’s 100m managed to exceed the lofty expectations set for it.

From an American perspective, the race was all about Noah Lyles, the defending world champion in the 100 and 200, who is seeking to become the first American man since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win both of those events in a single Olympics. The 100 was widely considered to be Lyles’s weaker of the two events. His best time this year was 9.81, while his main rival, Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson, had run a 9.79. Everyone knew it would be a close race, but no one could have predicted just how close it was.

NOAH LYLES’ OLYMPIC DREAM COMES TRUE!

100M GOLD MEDALIST. #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/qR6bkXLHhE

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 4, 2024

(Mitch Goldich and I discussed the race at length on the latest episode of Daily Rings, our daily Olympics podcast.)

For a sub-10-second race, it was packed with drama. Lyles got off to a slow start and was in last place for long enough (nearly the first half of the race) that your brain had just enough to begin considering the possibility of an enormous letdown. Thompson, meanwhile, was at the head of the pack. But Lyles turned on the jets and closed the gap between him and Thompson, leading to one of the most thrilling finishes of any Olympic event in history.

NBC announcer Leigh Diffey initially said that Thompson had won the race. That seemed plausible, given that he had led from the start and Lyles had plenty of ground to make up. It felt like it took an eternity to determine who actually won the race. Lyles had time to seek out Thompson and congratulate him on a race well run as they looked up at the scoreboard together to see what their official times would be.

Eventually, after an agonizing wait and a review of the photo finish, the times were posted and Lyles was declared the winner by a mere 0.005 seconds. He ran a 9.784, while Thompson ran a 9.789.

“We were waiting for the names to pop up, and I'm going to be honest, I came over [to Thompson] and I was like: ‘I think you got that one, big dawg!’” Lyles told reporters after the race. “Something said I need to lean, and I was like, ‘I’m going to lean,’ because it’s that type of race.”

You couldn’t script a more dramatic finish to such a monumental race. How fortunate are we that we can take a race that lasts less than half as long as Aaron Judge’s average home run trot and be able to discuss it at such length?

And the narrative building will continue until Thursday’s men’s 200-meter final, where Lyles has a chance to complete his rare double and etch his name next to some of the greatest Olympic sprinters in history.

With gold in Paris, Djokovic became only the fifth athlete to win a tennis Golden Slam. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

The best of Sports Illustrated

• Greg Bishop has more on Noah Lyles’s extraordinary 100 meters win.

• The other big gold medal win for the U.S. in Paris on Sunday was Bobby Finke’s victory in the 1,500m freestyle, which, as Pat Forde explains, ensured that an important American swimming streak stayed alive.

• Bob Harig was at Le Golf National, where an emotional Scottie Scheffler added another honor to his trophy cabinet.

• Harig also wrote about how Sunday’s dramatic final round answered any remaining questions about golf’s place in the Olympics.

• Novak Djokovic was also overcome with emotion after winning his gold medal match against Carlos Alcaraz. Jon Wertheim writes that Djokovic’s win cements his place among the greatest athletes in history.

• Stephanie Apstein covered a big day in gymnastics, with Suni Lee capturing bronze in uneven bars and the French-born Kaylia Nemour winning gold while representing Algeria.

• American Kristen Faulker secured one of the biggest upsets of these Olympics when she won the women’s cycling road race. Andrew Gastelum has some info on her journey from Alaska, to Harvard, to the Olympics—less than a decade after she started cycling.

• The tee times for the first two rounds of the Olympic women’s golf tournament have been announced.

The top five…

… things I saw yesterday:

5. Kaylia Nemour’s gold medal-winning routine on the uneven bars.
4. Truls Möregårdh’s trick shot in the men’s singles table tennis gold medal match.
3. Kristen Faulkner’s comeback win in the women’s cycling road race.
2. This composite image of the men’s 100m by Getty photographer Hector Vivas.
1. Walter Bou’s jaw-dropping goal in the Argentinian league. Not only was it a bicycle kick from outside the box, it won the game in the 90th minute.