Olympic champion Noah Lyles has firmly denied that luck had any role in his thrilling 100m gold medal win at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Instead, the sprint king revealed that a crucial tactical mistake by Kishane Thompson and others handed him the edge in one of the closest finishes in Olympic sprint history.
Lyles clocked 9.79 seconds, narrowly beating Jamaican speedster Kishane Thompson by a razor-thin margin of 0.005 seconds, with Fred Kerley settling for bronze. While Thompson later attributed his loss to inexperience on the global stage, Lyles says the real issue was a common misstep among his rivals — and one he smartly avoided.
“No, I don’t think it is. I think he and Fred, I think almost everybody’s thing that cost them the race was trying to be more than they needed to be,” Lyles said in an interview with Run Blog Run.
He explained that most sprinters exploded out of the blocks too aggressively, burning excessive energy early on, which left them drained in the final stretch. “Everybody in the first 10 meters made drastic jumps in their time… because you expended that energy there, you lost it at the end,” he added.
Rather than panic or overperform, Lyles adopted a composed approach. He treated the Olympic final like any other race and stuck to his usual plan. “Why do you have to be more than you are if you’ve already trained for this moment?” he reflected.
At the 60-meter mark, Lyles sensed he had closed the gap with the leaders. By the time he reached 80 meters, he mentally prepared for the deciding moment — the lean at the finish line. That decision, according to Lyles, sealed his fate and landed him Olympic gold.
“By the time I got 10 meters left, I was already preparing the lean… this was it, it’s either now or never,” he explained.
As he gears up for the World Championships in Tokyo, Lyles says this cool-headed mindset remains his competitive edge. “I don’t need to be more, I don’t need to be less, I just need to be me, and I’ll get the job done every time,” he concluded.
