You couldn’t have scripted it any better.

If last night’s 100-meter final were a movie, the critics would write that it was over-the-top and unrealistically dramatic. Except it really happened.

After a comically long buildup, the best sprinters in the world settled into the starting blocks. When the gun went off, reigning World champion Noah Lyles had, frankly, a terrible start. After only losing one 100m race all year, Lyles finished second in both his prelim and semifinal, and with Jamaican Kishane Thompson looking phenomenal through the rounds, all of a sudden it seemed like Lyles was the underdog. And for 99 meters of the race, that was still the case.

Lyles closed like a freight train like he always does, reaching a top-end speed that literally no one else in the world can replicate. But it looked like it wouldn’t be enough until the final step of the race, when Lyles lunged for the finish. Then everyone stood around and looked up at the screen, as the timekeepers sorted out the medals among the blanket finish.

Finally, it popped up. Lyles - 9.79; Thompson - 9.79. By 5/1000ths of a second, Lyles had delivered on his pre-race hype and silenced his many critics. He had to run a lifetime best to do it, and he got the job done.

Lyles is a polarizing figure in the sport of track and field, and for good reason. Internationally, he represents everything that irks athletics fans (especially Jamaicans) about Americans — he’s loud, overconfident, and dramatic, always sucking up the attention in any room he’s in. At home, NBC viewers could understandably be feeling a little bit of Lyles fatigue as his face was splashed across every promotion, ad, and interstitial leading up to, and during, the Olympic broadcast.

But no one can say that the man who talks the talk doesn’t also walk the walk. If there’s one word to describe Noah Lyles, it’s undeniable. And if the goal of the average sports fan is to consume a thrilling entertainment product, Lyles is all-in on delivering what the people want.

Oh yeah — there was a lot of other excellent track and field too. The other biggest American stars ran earlier in the day, with Gabby Thomas and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone looking like gold-medal favorites in the heats of the 200m and 400m hurdles, respectively, and 2022 World champ Michael Norman letting the world know he’s still a major player in the men’s 400m.

In the 800m and 1500m semis, the favorites all advanced, but not without a little drama. Keely Hodgkinson will be flying solo against Kenyan Mary Moraa after talk of a British sweep fizzled with Phoebe Gill and Jemma Reekie’s failure to advance. There will only be one American in the 800m final, but it will be a transcendent Juliette Whittaker, the 20-year-old NCAA standout who moved up to #3 all-time on the collegiate lists with her 1:57.76 to make the final.

In the 1500m, all the big names made it through, but if you thought the drama in the 100m was intense, wait until Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen throw down in the 1500m final. The co-favorites will likely turn the battle for gold into a total slugfest, but at least one of the medals could easily be claimed by an American as Yared Nuguse, Cole Hocker, and Hobbs Kessler all safely advanced looking strong.

And right before the 100m final, the two field event finals ended with gold medals going to young stars in thrilling fashion, as 22-year-olds Ethan Katzberg and Yaroslava Mahuchikh picked up their first (but in all likelihood, not their last) Olympic titles in the men’s hammer throw and women’s high jump. It was a great day for Ukrainian field eventers all around, as they won gold and bronze in the high jump and bronze in the hammer throw amidst continued turmoil in the country.

Our CITIUS MAG crew continues to offer top-tier reporting and banter from Paris with the GOOD MORNING TRACK AND FIELD crew featuring Eric Jenkins, Mitch Dyer, and Karen Leisewicz at 8:30 am E.T. each day and the TORCH TALK podcast after the final events wrap up. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify for daily reports straight from the heart of the action.

What To Watch On Day 4

The headlines of the day will be the women’s 5000m and 800m semifinals, where Kenyan fans will be hoping for multiple gold medals between Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet in the 5000m and Mary Moraa in the 800m. But they’ll have to go through the likes of Sifan Hassan and Gudaf Tsegay in the longer event and Keely Hodgkinson and Tsige Duguma in the shorter event.

Field event fans will get to cheer for Olympic champ Valarie Allman in the discus final and Mondo Duplantis in the pole vault final as they try to defend their respective Olympic titles. And sprint fans will get semifinals of the women’s 200m, first rounds of the women’s 200m and men’s 400m hurdles, and a whole bunch of repechage rounds for folks who got bounced out yesterday. Plan your Monday work schedule accordingly!

You can find a full schedule and live results here.

Race of the Day: Men’s 100m

We’ve already talked a lot about Noah Lyles’s golden moment, but it’s important to realize that his accomplishment is made far more impressive by the field he beat.

9.91 seconds was good for dead last in this final. It was the first time in history that an entire field of eight sprinters broke 10 seconds in a wind-legal race, and not only that, seven of the eight men in the race broke 9.90.

The credentials of the field were incredible. The reigning Olympic champion, 2022 and 2023 World champions, and 2024 world leader were all lining up. Five of the eight finalists already had global medals in the highly-volatile event before the race even started.

Kishane Thompson showing up in his first Olympics at age 23 and taking silver was almost the exception to the theme of the final: veteran championship performers getting it done when it counts. It’s clear that the biggest challenge faced by 2021 champ Lamont Marcell Jacobs is staying healthy, and even though he was limping as soon as he crossed the finish line, the Italian still managed a 9.85 5th-place finish. Fred Kerley’s bronze medal was a validation of the enigmatic Texan’s continual betting on himself. Guys like 4th-placer Akani Simbine and 7th-placer Kenny Bednarek have been grinding away on the racing circuit for years and are finally getting recognition on a larger stage.

At the same time, the future of the event is bright. Thompson is clearly just getting started, and the injury-prone Jamaican successfully got through three strong rounds of racing without any issues — which he hasn’t been able to do before now. And while 21-year-old Botswanan Letsile Tebogo only finished 6th, he set a PB and broke his own national record in the process with a 9.86 finish. And with the 200m being his stronger event, the best is literally yet to come.

Often times, marquee events at the Olympics have a big favorite heading in. And while Lyles is now the back-to-back global champion, this was undoubtedly one of the more closely-matched finals in recent memory from top to bottom, and the result was a race jam-packed with drama from start to finish. It goes to show that while record-breaking is thrilling in its own right, you don’t need to put Usain Bolt on the starting line to give the world a great show.

Athlete of the Day: Yaroslava Mahuchikh

Expectations were sky-high for Yaroslava Mahuchikh. When you break a world record that’s older than you are, like Mahuchikh did earlier this season with her 2.10m leap at the Paris Diamond League, there’s nowhere to go but down.

But that doesn’t seem to bother the 22-year-old Mahuchikh much, based on her continued excellence in championship settings. The bronze medalist from Tokyo upgraded to a silver in 2022, then gold at 2023 Worlds, and then repeated her feat here, leaping 2.00m on the first try and never seriously being challenged for the win.

Mahuchikh now has World and Olympic golds, a World Indoor title, and the world record in her specialty event. All at an age where most college students are still looking for their first full-time job, and in an era where her home country has been invaded and countless friends and family members have their safety threatened.

We’ll never get tired of watching Mahuchikh jump, as the world #1 is a masterful technician and always seems supremely relaxed when she takes flight. The good news is that, if all goes well, we may have another two decades of cheering her on.

Photo of the Day:

Ammar Yahia Ibrahim of Qatar didn’t advance out of the heats of the 400m — he’s headed to the repechage round. But you wouldn’t know it from his finish line celebration, where the Qatari was thrilled to have knocked 0.72 seconds off his lifetime best with his 44.66 performance.

Social Moment of the Day:

400m hurdler Rai Benjamin humorously noted that the many Twitter commentators who are critical of American sprinting didn’t have much to say after Team USA went 1-3 in the 100m final.