Noah Lyles Wins His First Gold Medal in 100-Meter Final at 2024 Paris Olympics

Noah Lyles ran away with the gold medal in the men’s 100m final.

The 27-year-old world No. 1 sprinter finished in a personal best time of 9.79 to secure first place on Sunday, August 4 at the Stade de France at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Lyles’ time beat Jamaican sprinter Kishane Thompson, who took home the silver medal, and his U.S. teammate Fred Kerley, who finished third.

The win marks Lyles’ first Olympic gold medal and the first time the U.S. team has won gold in the event since the 2004 Athens Games. Lyles previously won bronze in the 200-meter final at Tokyo 2021 — and to mark the U on the occasion of his first gold, the athlete raised his racing shirt in the air, showing his surname to the world.

“To be honest, I just believed in myself,” Lyles told reporters, including PEOPLE, of finishing the race strong after being in seventh place at the halfway mark after a slower reaction time. “It proves that reaction time doesn’t win races.”

Noah Lyles celebrates his name after winning the gold medal in the men’s 100m final at the Paris Olympics.

KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images

Lyles says he believed his competitor Thompson “got it in the end,” and walked up to him while they were waiting for points and said, “Bro, I think you’ve got that big dog.”

“And then my name came up and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m amazing,'” he says. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t ready to see it. And that’s the first time I’ve said that in my head, like I wasn’t ready to see it. It was a few lanes down, so it was hard for me to imagine where we were, but I guess that was good.”

The athlete also notes that he was ready for this year to be different from the Tokyo Olympics, telling reporters that he knew “every step of the way that it wasn’t 2021.”

I still keep going forward, going forward, going forward, and I knew that when the time came to be able to say, ‘This is the final, this is where I need to put it together,’ I was I’m going to do it,” he says. The men’s final at The 100m came about two hours after the semi-finals, where Lyles came in second behind Jamaica’s Oblique Sevilla and just ahead of Great Britain’s Louie Hinchcliffe.

Noah Lyles on winning bronze after a tough year: ‘Just because I’m fighting doesn’t mean I’m going to give up’

Noah Lyles and Louie Hinchcliffe during the 100m semi-finals on August 4.

Sam Barnes/Sportsfile via Getty

American Kenneth Bednarek also competed in the 100m final along with Lyles and Kerley (29) and was seventh.

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On Saturday, Lyles finished second to Hinchcliffe in the 100m despite being expected to finish first.

Sprinter Noah Lyles broke the decades-old American record in the 200 meters and won gold in the race in the USA

After the heat, Lyles told reporters that finishing second was his “first lesson in underestimating the power of the Olympics,” according to ESPN.

“The plan was first. But it didn’t happen. Second is fine. We’ll make sure it’s first from now on,” Lyles added on Saturday.

At the 2022 World Athletics Championships, Lyles broke the men’s 200m world record with a time of 19.31. The previous record – set a year before Lyles was even born – belonged to Michael Johnson’s 1996 time of 19.32.

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Source: HIS Education