The Olympic athletics programme, highlighted by the shortest event and then the longest, saw performances of astonishing quality and spine-tingling drama, played out to a beautiful and unique purple backdrop that will forever mean Paris. The closest and highest-quality men’s 100m race and a late-night pole vault world record lit up the first week, while Sifan Hassan’s final-day marathon win to cap a barely believable hat-trick of medals was a fitting way to bring down the curtain. “It’s been fantastic and I think the quality of athletics at the moment is almost beyond description,” Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, said this week.
“I can’t remember a time when we’ve had such a bandwidth of excellence.” Nowhere was that more visible than in the men’s 100m where Noah Lyles caught Kishane Thompson on the line to win by five-thousandths of a second in 9.79.
The six men behind them were also sub-10 – the first time that has happened in a legal race. South Africa’s Akani Simbine came fourth in 9.82s.
Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands wins gold in the women’s marathon. (Photo: Anton Geyser / Gallo Images) Victorious Sifan Hassan at Invalides in Paris on 11 August 2024. (Photo: Anton Geyser / Gallo Images) Lyles, the sport’s biggest showman, was unable to double up, taking bronze in the 200m and then revealing he was running with Covid.
Instead, Botswana’s quiet assassin, Letsile Tebogo , became the first African to win it with a time if 19.46s. The .