SAINT-DENIS, France — Late Sunday, 20 minutes before a track superstar turned into an icon, Keisha Caine Bishop walked the outer ring at Stade de France with her daughter. They were pretty much alone. The sun kept dropping, nearby horizons turning purple and orange and a darker yellow, a hue that looked a lot like …
Gold.
She wasn’t exactly nervous. And she wasn’t exactly calm.
Her son, Noah Lyles—the bombastic, shoe-painting, anime-watching, LEGO-building sprinter—needed to prove that embracing every single zany slice of his ever-more public personality had made him faster.
“I just want to get this going,” she said, smiling, in a way that indicated she knew more than she wanted to say out loud.
Just before he left for Paris, Lyles’s biomechanist Ralph Mann told him one thing: He held the thumb and pointer finger on his right hand no more than half an inch apart. A sliver maybe. The end of a pen cap. A popsicle stick, laid flat. The 100-meter final, Mann predicted, would be that close—specifically, the physical non-distance between first place and second.
Lyles, 27, nearly tied the 100-meter final on Sunday. He came as close as one can in his sport to running exactly the same time as another sprinter. Five-thousandths of a single second separated the gold and silver medal winners. That’s 0.005 seconds. Google: what can happen in 0.005 seconds? The primary and prevalent answer is … nothing. At least that can be perceived.
In winning the 100-meter dash, Lyles secured his first—but not likely his last—Olympic gold medal.
“It feels good,” he said, “to back it up.”
A lifetime unfolded between the walk onto the track and the photo finish. It began with an extraordinary Olympic prelude. The inside of the stadium all but pulsated. A deejay, clad in a black leather jacket, wearing sunglasses at night, spun deep house. As the bright stadium bulbs went completely dark, without warning, the lights along the upper ring flashed white and purple, in sync with the beats. The crowd gasped. Spotlights scanned from one side to the other, while tiny lights sparkled throughout the stands, thanks to wristbands fans were given at the gates. The thumping bass elevated, slowly at first, then faster, faster and faster, until the whole stadium felt like a bubble of anticipation about to pop.
One by one, the men’s 100-meter finalists made their way onto the track. Here they were, in Paris, in an Olympic final, in their sport’s premier race. Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson, a favorite with the world’s fastest time this year, leaned back in the entrance tunnel, before slowly raising both arms, tilting his head back and roaring like a lion. The camera strung above the purple track dropped and elevated, slinging left and right, before settling on the obvious suspect: Lyles.
He didn’t saunter onto the track. Nor did he swagger in. He ran. Not sprinting, but not slowly. He didn’t stop at the starting blocks, like everybody else. He cruised about 15 meters beyond the others.
Lyles never stopped moving, like he had bottled every ounce of energy and online hatred and unrealized ambition but could no longer hold it in. His feet bounced on the purple track—purple, his favorite color—springing up, then down, as if guided by a trampoline underfoot.
Fred Kerley, another American finalist, entered the stadium right then. He held a finger to his lips, as if to say, quiet down. Perhaps that gesture was meant for Lyles, whose general nature had grated on his competition, especially over the last six months.
Lyles screamed. He beat his chest with both hands. Energy seemed to rise from his body, like steam rising from a whistling kettle. He saluted, then appeared to repeat the same three words, over and over. It looked like he was saying: Thank you, God.
The crowd began to clap. The introductions dragged on for minutes that unspooled like hours. The competitors—the world’s fastest men—stepped in place, swayed, danced, waiting for the signal. The defending Olympic 100-meter champion, Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy, stood still with his eyes closed.
At 9:53 p.m. local time, the sprinters leaned their bodies forward and placed their spikes into the starting blocks. The stadium dropped into near silence. The loudest sound came from the helicopters hanging overhead.
Anticipation isn’t the right word. The general feeling landed around start this damn thing already. The gun sounded. And off they went.
For the first few meters, Lyles sprinted from the back of the pack—perhaps, even, in last place. But that didn’t last long. He caught them, all of them, these strong, powerful, human locomotives, each churning as fast as humanly possible toward the same line down the track.
For a second, it appeared that Kerley had won. Then it appeared that Lyles did. Then Thompson. Those three names flashed across the video screens, in that order. Everyone stood around the finish line.
Lyles approached Thompson at one point. “Hey, man,” Lyles told him, “I think you got it.”
It didn’t take long for officials to come back with the results. Lyles surely must have never been happier to be dead wrong. Those same three names flashed on those same screens, only this time, in a different order: Lyles-Thompson-Kerley. The men’s 100-meter final gold, silver and bronze medalists, respectively.
In the video analysis Olympic officials distributed after the race, Lyles was last, even at the 30-meter mark. He did not lead at any other point. In Lane 7, he didn’t have time to look left, at Thompson in Lane 4, or Kerley in Lane 3. He told himself the obvious, in fractions of critical seconds. I need to lean. So that’s what Lyles did. He leaned. They all did. Photographs from the finish line make the runners look like their necks are being bent forward by a gale-force wind.
His winning time, 9.79 seconds, matched Ben Johnson’s steroid-aided world record in 1988, the one that didn’t stand. He is the first male U.S. sprinter to win the race since Justin Gatlin in 2004. Lyles began to alternately gallop and jog and walk around the track. He pumped his fists. He unleashed screams. He held his race bib, the one that read LYLES in black letters, and jumped a barrier to celebrate with Keisha and other relatives.
Lyles showed up as Noah on Sunday. Last month, Keisha said that the biggest difference she saw in her son from Tokyo—where he won bronze in the 200 meters—and Paris, was a fuller embrace of just how different he was. He came to a better understanding of self, which led him to a better understanding of his sport.
Before Paris, former sprinter Michael Johnson said that of all America’s promising young superstars, Lyles had the best chance to vault to a new level of stardom with his results. “But he has to do it in Paris, at the Olympics, and more than once,” Johnson added.
Sunday marked an ideal start, for the six-time world champion and the now two-time Olympic medalist, who found himself and found his speed. Now, he can continue to chase one of his sport’s rarest achievements in Paris—the sprint double. It’s not a lock. But it’s not that far away, either. Lyles didn’t lose one 200-meter race over the 2022 and ’23 seasons.
Before Sunday’s final, Lyles wasn’t nervous—same as Keisha on her walk. He thought back to a regular topic he had been exploring with his therapist. To not view pressure as a problem, to understand the notion that wanting something doesn’t always equate to being able to automatically deliver it.
“I was extremely curious to see what was gonna happen,” he said. “I came in third fastest [in the semis.] This [was] not going to be easy. That’s how we phrase it. I’m curious what I’m gonna do. How am I going to pull this off?”
His therapist, Lyles said, told him to let go in those moments, to relax and be himself. Turns out, to achieve the rarest kind of greatness, and to lift his sport to the same heights he’s headed toward, that was all he ever needed.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Noah Lyles Crowned World’s Fastest Man: ‘It Feels Good to Back It Up’.
