A minute later, Noah Lyles is given the highest honour that can be aspired to in the Stade de France, which has become a discotheque of lights and screams: he grabs the chain and rings the bell that only champions can ring. He does it like a crazed, uncontrolled child. He has just won the 100m final, the goal of his life. He has done it with a race like all his, a bad start and progression. He wins like no one has ever won an Olympic 100m gold medal before, with a magnificent time, 9.79s, the best of his life, by a very small margin, five thousandths of a second, a difference with the second, the frustrated Jamaican Kishane Thompson, that only the photo finish could find. Exactly 9.784s by 9.789s. A sigh, the final exhalation. The power of Olympic speed returns to the United States 20 years after Justin Gatlin won in Athens after a sirtaki session and before testing positive for doping.
Third was Fred Kerley, the discreet and serious American, god of concentration and mistakes with his sponsors’ shoes (9.81s). The Italian Marcell Jacobs, Olympic champion in Tokyo, made his best time of a year in which he began training in the United States, 9.85s, which only earned him fifth place. In Tokyo he won with 9.80s.
Lyles won. Nobody expected it. Not everyone wanted it.
In front of the tacos, in the last seconds of an endless presentation, and music from mindfulness In the stadium to calm the hearts before his explosion, Noah Lyles, leaning on lane seven, can look to his left, at those who have promised to be the executioners of his Olympic dream. They are two Jamaicans. They aspire to the throne of speed, to victory in the 100m, the only race that adds the qualification of fastest man in the world to the Olympic title. They aspire to inherit Usain Bolt, the colossal dominator of the previous decade and of history. They are Asafa Powell compacted into a colossus with the shoulders of a dockworker, quadriceps and glutes like a velodrome handle, muscles and dynamite called Kishane Thompson and an Usain Bolt hunched into a 1.70m speed bomb called Oblique Seville. Jamaica wants to regain the power of speed. In Kingston, his coaches, also the coaches of his older brothers, Stephen Francis and Glen Mills, embrace their beer bellies and speed savants, and Snoop Dogg, Lyles’ number one fan, rehearses rhymes in the front row of the stadium.
The odds are against the American who trains in Orlando with Lance Bauman, the man who made Tyson Gay world champion in 2007 before the arrival of Bolt who changed speed forever. In the heats, he started badly and had no ability to react, increased speed in the middle and final phase and was beaten by a rough student of Carl Lewis, the British Louie Hinchcliffe. In the semi-finals, the same thing happened. Oblique Seville (9.81s) overtook him at the start and he had no transition to catch him, despite achieving his best time of the year, 9.83s. Two hours later, in the final, Lyles was first and Seville was last (9.91s).
Everyone was rooting for Thompson, who not only started with the best world time of the year (9.77s) but was also able to start with power and stay ahead by increasing his speed. He did it in the heats, relaxed, he did it in the semi-final, more tense, the fastest of all, 9.80s. He even improved it in the final, when Lyles made an unexpected comeback. According to the analysis of the organisation, always approximated by the way they take the times, at 30m the Jamaican was already in first place (3.84s), while Lyles was last, six hundredths behind, almost a metre. This situation continued until 50m, when Lyles, his progression maintained, was already third (5.61s) five hundredths behind Thompson, who maintained his speed. They passed the 60m in 6.41s and 6.44s, respectively. Lyles was second after just 90 metres, a hundredth of a second behind the Jamaican who had already reached his limit. And it was only in the last step, the last breaststroke, that Lyles came forward, his springy step, he would jump, with tremendous progression, taking advantage of all the bounce of the lavender track and his carbon soles. I couldn’t see him, but he was watching me, hunting me down,” says Thompson, a good loser, who remembers that, although the silver medal is a disappointment, at least he has finished without injuries, which has always been his weak point. And he reveals the quick conversation he had with Lyles after the race. “He said to me, ‘Hey, Kishane, I thought you had done it,’ and I replied: ‘I’m not so sure.'”
Lyles’ victory is the victory of an athlete with a vision of the past and the future. A man capable of feeling at home on the catwalk of fashion with models that only PSG footballers or the unfortunate Koundé dare to wear, and also as a children’s hero. Capable of winning the trials of the United States showing off different Yu-Gi-Oh! cards at the beginning of each series, or of getting excited when his mother, to whom he is so attached, tells him that she has met Elmo, his favourite character from Sesame Street, on the streets of Paris, and shows him the selfie she took with him. Athletics is a show, it has to be a show, we have to be stars, is Lyles’ usual proclamation. And the purists call him a braggart. They say he is false, artificial. They tell him that what was natural charisma in Bolt is posturing in him. But he swallows it, holds on and wins. And he can already shout it: he is the fastest. The 200m, his favourite race, and the 4 x 100 relay await him, and he even wants to run the 4 x 400, and win four medals in the same Games, as only the myths he wants to be, Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis, have managed before.
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