PARIS (Reuters) - 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 100 metres 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 100 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. Lyles, the sport's biggest showman, was unable to double up, taking bronze in the 200 and then revealing he was running with COVID. Instead, Botswana's quiet assassin Letsile Tebogo became the first African to win it.
The United States delivered a world record in the rarely-run mixed 4x400 relay but Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone's obliteration of her own world record to win the 400 hurdles was of a different magnitude of quality. Mondo Duplantis also beat his own pole vault world record in a moment of great thea.