SAINT-DENIS, France -- Noah Lyles paced on the far end of the track, hands folded over the top of his head, wistfully looking up at a scoreboard that would, sooner or later, flash an answer he's been seeking over three sweat-soaked years. Was all that toil since the last Olympics - all the work on the practice track and in the weight room in the name of finding a centimeter here or a millisecond there - really going to be worth all the trouble? Ten seconds passed, then 20. Then, nearly 30.
And then, the answer popped up. Yes, Lyles is the 100-meter champion at the Paris Olympics. The World's Fastest Man.
Just not by very much. The American showman edged out Jamaica's Kishane Thompson on Sunday by five-thousandths of a second - that's .005 of one tick of the clock - in a race for the ages.
The final tally in this one: Lyles 9.784 seconds, Thompson 9.789.
The new champion said that before he left for Paris, one of his physio guys ensured him this race would be a squeaker. "He said, 'This is how close first and second are going to be,'" Lyles said as he pinched his thumb and his forefinger together so they were almost touching. "I can't believe how right he was.
" For perspective, the blink of an eye takes, on average, .1 second. That was 20 times longer than the gap between first and second.
It was so close, that when the sprinters crossed the line and the word "Photo" popped up next to the names of Lyles, Thompson and five others in the eight-man field, Lyles walked over to the.